Sunday, February 26, 2012

We Need an Organic Farm Bill

We Need an Organic Farm Bill
David Murphy is founder and exec dir of Food Democracy Now! Feb 21, 2012

In order to meet the serious challenges of the 21st century, U.S. agricultural policy in the farm bill must shift from its focus of creating cheap commodities and artificially propping up income for farmers, toward implementing best agricultural practices for sustainable and organic production methods.
Fortunately, while much of mainstream agriculture has focused on an increasing reliance on chemicals and biotech engineered seeds, over the past 40 years, a new breed of farmer has developed highly sophisticated ways of farming with nature that promote soil health, higher nutrient value of food and increased farm income.
If Congress and the current administration are serious about the health of America’s citizens, our environment and the economic viability of independently owned family farms, they will:
• Implement a $25 billion plan to transition to organic food and farming production, to make sure that 75% of U.S. farms are U.S.D.A. organic certified by 2025.
• Feed organic food to all children enrolled in public school lunch programs by the year 2020.
• Pass a Beginning Farmer and Rancher Bill to place a million new farmers on the land by 2020.
• Link conservation compliance with government-subsidized insurance programs and create a cutoff so each farm receives government funds for land only up to 1,000 acres.

The implementation of these proposals will ensure that our nation’s children are fed the healthiest meals, our environment is preserved for future generations and farmers make a sustainable living.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Supply-driven pharmaceutical drug and disease marketing has turned nation into pill-popping hypochondriacs

Supply-driven pharmaceutical drug and disease marketing has turned nation into pill-popping hypochondriacs
Feb 22, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/035032_hypochondriacs_drug_marketing_pills.html#ixzz1nCtLaXoB
(NaturalNews) Ever since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided to allow drug cos to air direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements for prescription drugs on national television back in 1997, drug industry sales and profits have soared exponentially. Combined with its direct-to-doctor (DTD) marketing-slash-bribery schemes and the endless creation of new drugs for made-up diseases and conditions, Big Pharma has successfully created a hypochondriac society where every feeling, emotion, and unique human idiosyncrasy is considered to be a disease in need of a drug -- and millions of people have bought into the lie.

According to a fascinating and very well-written report in AlterNet, Big Pharma is in the business of marketing disease just as much as it is the drugs that supposedly treat disease. Known as "supply-driven marketing," the drug industry has to continually invent new conditions that require the use of exclusive, patented medications, as well as convince the public that it has such conditions. And adult ADHD, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, and sleeping disorders are just a few of today's most common "blockbuster" conditions with vague diagnosing guidelines that the industry uses to push more drugs.

When one condition reaches its marketing "peak," in other words, or when the exclusive drugs used to treat that condition lose patent protection and become open to the generic market, drug companies simply invent a new drug for a new condition that they scare the public into thinking they have. Adult ADHD, for instance, is the new depression, covering a wide range of supposed "symptoms" with which millions of people "suffer." Such symptoms are deliberately vague and highly-subjective, which means that millions of people viewing print and TV ads designed to scare them into thinking they have these conditions become self-diagnosed hypochondriacs.

"The crux of the matter is that there is simply no definitive understanding of how neuronal activity is related to subjective consciousness, the age-old unsolved body/mind relationship," Dr. Phillip Sinaikin, author of the journal Psychiatryland, is quoted as saying to AlterNet, concerning the adult ADHD issue in particular. In a shamelessly obvious marketing campaign for adult ADHD drugs, WebMD has posted comparative PET scans of two brains that it claims illustrates the existence of the condition (http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/ss/slideshow-adhd-in-adults).

"We have not advanced beyond phrenology, and this article in WebMD is simply the worst kind of manipulation by the drug industry to sell their overpriced products, in this case a desperate effort by Shire (a biopharmaceutical co) to maintain a market share when Adderall goes generic."

Sources for this article include:
http://www.alternet.org
http://www.alternet.org

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/035032_hypochondriacs_drug_marketing_pills.html#ixzz1nCt7rTNX

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Sell Monsanto! List of top mutual funds to ditch because they own Monsanto shares


Sell Monsanto! List of top mutual funds to ditch because they own Monsanto shares
Feb 16, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/034989_Monsanto_mutual_funds_sell.html#ixzz1mZDL95Xr
(NaturalNews) If the natural health community really wants to get serious about hitting evil corporations like Monsanto where it hurts, then it is time to start boycotting the companies that support, invest in, or otherwise have a relationship with Monsanto and its partner companies. And this includes dumping mutual fund and investment companies that hold a significant amount of shares in Monsanto.
Monsanto is a publicly-traded co, which means members of the public, including other large cos and investment firms, can buy shares in said company for investment purposes. This, of course, is one of the primary ways publicly-traded companies are able to raise needed funds and capital to keep on doing business.

While some investors make decisions on which securities to buy purely for financial reasons, others invest more consciously based on respect for a co. and its products, for instance, or because they really want to see it succeed in the long-run. In either case, there are a number of investors in Monsanto that you may be interested in knowing about, if for no other reason than to pull your funds out of them because of their partnership with the world's most evil and sinister corporation.

According to Yahoo! Finance, 83% of Monsanto's shares are held by institutional and mutual fund owners. The top ten institutional holders and mutual fund holders in Monsanto as of the writing of this article are as follows:
Top Institutional Holders
• The Vanguard Group, Inc. -- 21,361,249 shares
• State Street Corporation -- 20, 096, 055 shares
• T. Rowe Price -- 17,442,437 shares
• PRIMECAP Management Company -- 14,933,282 shares
• Jennison Associates LLC -- 14,526,041 shares
• BlackRock Institutional Trust Company, N.A. -- 12,775,828 shares
• Davis Selected Advisers, L.P. -- 11,426,858 shares
• FMR LLC -- 11,118,244 shares
• Marsico Capital Managements, LLC -- 11,079,586 shares
• AllianceBernstein, L.P. -- 9,876,978 shares
Top Mutual Fund Holders
• Vanguard / Primecap Fund -- 6,707,060 shares
• Market Vectors ETF Tr-Agribusiness ETF -- 6,624,107 shares
• Davis New York Venture Fund -- 6,600,196 shares
• Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund -- 6,204,474 shares
• Fidelity Growth Company Fund -- 4,789,978 shares
• Vanguard 500 Index Fund -- 4,771,300 shares
• Vanguard Institutional Index Fund - Institutional Index FD - 4,378,112 shs
• SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust -- 4,182,071 shares
• College Retirement Equities Fund - Stock Account -- 4,045,420 shares
• Mainstay Large Cap Growth Fund -- 3,857,600 shares

The top five Major Direct Holders in Monsanto include Hugh Grant, the company's chairman, president, and CEO; William U. Parfet, chairman and CEO of MPI Research, a pharmaceutical company; Brett D. Begemann, executive vice president and chief commercial officer of Monsanto; Robert T. Fraley, Monsanto's executive vice president and chief technology officer; and Carl M. Casale, president and CEO of CHS Inc., a cooperative that supplies energy, crop nutrients, grain, livestock feed, food and food ingredients, and business solutions.

If you or any one you know holds investments in any of these cos, be sure to ditch them as soon as possible in protest of their support for Monsanto. Doing so is a practical way to get the ball rolling in bringing about real grassroots change, and ending Monsanto's reign of agricultural terror.

You can also view a more extensive list of Monsanto's stockholders here:
http://investors.morningstar.com Sources for this article include:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=mon
http://www.naturalnews.com/Monsanto.html
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/034989_Monsanto_mutual_funds_sell.html#ixzz1mZDL95Xr

Friday, February 10, 2012

Aloe Vera - Specifically Herbal Aloe Force are near the #1 Overall Healer in the World

Aloe Vera helps reverse cancer and AIDS
January 28th, 2012
Aloe Vera Plant - Great Healer

Aloe Vera helps reverse cancer and AIDS

Jan 24, 2012 PF Louis and Don Porter http://www.naturalnews.com/034738_aloe_vera_cancer_AIDS.html#ixzz1kVmsoWSc

One of the best kept secrets in the nutritional field is aloe vera. Commonly recognized for soothing ulcers, hemorrhoids, sunburns, wounds and other skin ailments, many don’t know the power pure raw aloe vera juice has for improving and even reversing serious diseases that baffle mainstream medicine.

That’s because those claims are suppressed.
Herbal Aloe Force with Herbs - If a supplement or nutritional product promotes any kind of cure, the FDA and other agencies send their bootjack militia to raid them. A frightening example occurred in Tampa, Florida a couple of decades ago as research physician Ivan Danhoff MD was attempting to crash the medical mafia's cancer party.That's when his nutritional clinic was using aloe extracts and curing terminalcancer patients from hospice. Health agency thugs raided, pulling IVs out ofpatients whose condition had improved dramatically. Many died months later. Theclinical trial was going by FDA guidelines to get the aloe extract approved(http://www.naturalnews.com/028239_aloe_vera_FDA.html).Improving on nature is probably unnecessary with aloe veraThe desire to modify or isolate ingredients from aloe vera to create an accepted medical model that is efficacious without side effects is commendable. But it appears Big Pharma and the cancer industry's good fellas want to protect their turf. Allowing an actual cure would even put the cancer cure fund raisersout of business.Large Aloe Plant

Most store shelf aloe vera juices don’t do much beyond soothing the minor ailments mentioned earlier. Those juices are processed, heated, and diluted. That’s not the case with all aloe vera products. The right aloe vera juice products are miracle healers (http://www.naturalnews.com/021858.html).

The most dramatic clinical proof of pure raw aloe vera juice comes from research done with AIDS patients. Almost all who were put on a regimen of daily aloe vera juice got better with white T cell counts skyrocketing. It’s obvious that aloe vera is a potent immune booster, which implies it can be applied to other diseases.

Herbal Aloe Force

One of the AIDS patients in this trial was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer and told he had less than two months to live. His liver was so tumor riddled it was four times its normal size. He continued with the juice, improved gradually, and within a year all his tumors were gone.

A doctor involved with this trial, pathologist H. Reginald McDaniel MD, was at first skeptical. But now he has seriously ill patients using aloe successfully. What turned him around was his own illness, a viral pneumonia for which conventional medicine had no answer. He was given a couple of cases of aloe juice, and his cure turned him into an aloe advocate.

Aloe Leafs

Two short videos covering the aloe AIDS/cancer story are linked at the end of this paragraph. The last part of video 2 is censored, evidently to exclude information for ordering that particular juice. Promoting non-pharmaceutical AIDS and cancer cures is a no-no with the FDA. That data was probably pulled to protect them from FDA harassment (http://healthmaven.blogspot.com/2012/01/is-aloe-vera-cancer-cure-part.html).

Aloe’s healing power known for ages

The juice’s power has been known by indigenous groups for ages. Franciscan Friar Romano Zago discovered how to make the juice from Brazilian Indians, used it with local villagers, and published his findings in the 1980s. He used their recipe based on the indigenous aloe arborescense plant . You can download a pdf
summary of his book/recipe here (http://www.aloearborescens.org/Summary.pdf).

Father Zago’s juice and others are from whole leaves. It’s possible to get aloe juices without leaf skins (filleted) or reduced aloin content to minimize potential diarrhea side effects. Check below for some other aloe juice options or Google for others.
SEE BELOW
Sources for this article include:
Friar Romano Zago approved aloe juice products http://www.aloedeca.com/northamerica/ZagoNA.htm
http://www.aloedeca.com/northamerica/ProductNA.htm
Brazilian homemade cancer cure recipe http://www.aloearborescens.org/Summary.pdf
Aloe arborescense whole plant source http://www.cycadpalm.com/alarpl.html
Video of AIDS and cancer patient cures http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2dx0NKP8y8
Another juice source http://www.aloeverafarms.com/aloe-info.html
Another juice source http://www.lilyofthedesert.com/faq
Plug for cancer use http://www.canceractive.com/cancer-active-page-link.aspx?n=537
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/034738_aloe_vera_cancer_AIDS.html#ixzz1kVmj5V2d

Aloe Vera is the most impressive herb of them all


Garlic is a close2nd There is nothing on this planet that offers the amazing variety of healing benefits granted by Aloe Vera. In a single plant, Aloe Vera offers potent, natural medicine that:

• Halts the growth of cancer tumors.

• Lowers high cholesterol.

• Repairs “sludge blood” and reverses “sticky blood”.

• Boosts the oxygenation of your blood.

• Eases inflammation and soothes arthritis pain.

• Protects the body from oxidative stress.

• Prevents kidney stones and protects the body from oxalates in coffee and tea.

• Alkalizes the body, helping to balance overly acidic dietary habits.

• Cures ulcers, IBS, Crohn’s disease and other digestive disorders.

• Reduces high blood pressure natural, by treating the cause, not just the symptoms.

• Nourishes the body with minerals, vitamins, enzymes and glyconutrients.

• Accelerates healing from physical burns and radiation burns.

• Replaces dozens of 1st aid products, makes bandages & antibacterial sprays obsolete.

The Aloe Vera Miracle

• Halts colon cancer, heals the intestines & lubricates the digestive tract.

• Ends constipation.

• Stabilizes blood sugar and reduces triglycerides in diabetics.

• Prevents and treats candida infections.

• Protects the kidneys from disease.

• Functions as nature’s own “sports drink” for electrolyte balance.

• Boosts cardiovascular performance and physical endurance.

• Speeds recovery from injury or physical exertion.

• Hydrates the skin, accelerates skin repair.

My Due Diligence, hundreds of years of use, user referrals, my experiences indicate that there is nothing else that compares to the medicinal potential of aloe vera. And yet most people only know about the topical applications of Aloe Vera gel. They think it’s only good for sunburns. In reality, Aloe Vera is useful for both external & internal use

Posted in Beat Melanoma Cancer, Beat most Diseases with a Plant Based Diet, Clinton Weight Loss, Diets, Don J Porter,  donportercancer













Take A Peek Inside George Clooney’s Fridge

Thursday, February 9, 2012

7 Reasons Kale Is the New Beef

7 Reasons Kale Is the New Beef
Written by Jill Ettinger
Like the saying goes, the only constant is change. We may resist it all we want, but Time and its inevitable evolution of everything in its path is unaffected by our attempts to stop it. The resulting trajectory of humanity's nascent ascent appears to be positioning itself to sweep us into progressive new times, especially where our food choices are concerned, as nearly 7 billion people are now standing on the little scraps of land that we share with some 55 billion rather large animals raised for food each year. (As another famous saying goes: This town ain't big enough for the both of us.) So, beef (and all factory-farmed meat) may be going from rib-eye to relic as we transition to a greener world… literally—as in leafy, green vegetables.
Environmentalists cite meat production as one of the biggest contributors to global warming, and the USDA's new food pyramid (MyPlate) suggests the healthiest choice is making vegetables and fruit the biggest part of every meal by reducing consumption of animal proteins. Kale is far more nutritious than other leafy greens, but these seven reasons why it is such an important futurefood may just surprise you.
1. Anti-inflammatory: Inflammation is the number one cause of arthritis, heart disease and a number of autoimmune diseases, and is triggered by the consumption of animal products. Kale is an incredibly effective anti-inflammatory food, potentially preventing and even reversing these illnesses.
2. Iron: Despite the myth that vegetarians are anemic, the number of non-vegetarians with iron-deficiencies is on the rise. Per calorie, kale has more iron than beef.
3. Calcium: Dairy and beef both contain calcium, but the U.S. still has some of the highest rates of bone loss and osteoporosis in the world. Kale contains more calcium per calorie than milk (90 grams per serving) and is also better absorbed by the body than dairy.
4. Fiber: Like protein, fiber is a macronutrient, which means we need it every day. But many Americans don't eat nearly enough and the deficiency is linked to heart disease, digestive disorders and cancer. Protein-rich foods, like meat, contain little to no fiber. One serving of kale not only contains 5 percent of the recommended daily intake of fiber, but it also provides 2 grams of protein.
5. Omega fatty acids: Essential Omega fats play an important role in our health, unlike the saturated fats in meat. A serving of kale contains 121 mg of omega-3 fatty acids and 92.4 mg of omega-6 fatty acids.
6. Immunity: Superbugs - bacteria are a serious risk to our health. Many of these come as a result of factory farm meat, eggs and dairy products. Kale is an incredibly rich source of immune-boosting carotenoid and flavanoid antioxidants including vitamins A and C.
7. Sustainable: Kale grows to maturity in 55 to 60 days versus a cow raised for beef for an average of 18-24 months. Kale can grow in most climates and is relatively easy and low impact to grow at home or on a farm. To raise one pound of beef requires 16 pounds of grain, 11 times as much fossil fuel and more than 2,400 gallons of water.
Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger
Sources:
http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-wastes-natural-resources.aspx
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2461/2
http://www.irondisorders.org/iron-deficiency-anemia
http://www.ellenskitchen.com/faqs/calcium.html
Image: Steven Jackson Photography

Friday, February 3, 2012

No More Pink Slime In McDonald’s Burgers

No More Pink Slime In McDonald’s Burgers

BY KEVIN HUNT FEB 1, 2012
McDonald's Drops Pink Slime From Burgers
Today’s gross-out: McDonald’s has buckled to pressure from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and eliminated ammonium hydroxide from its hamburger meat. Ammonion hydroxide is the same ingredient used in household cleaners and fertilizers, even homemade bombs, though it is approved for food use by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
McDonald’s used the pink goop to convert inedible scrap meat into yummy hamburgers. McDonald’s acknowledged it stopped using “select beef trimmings,” a delicate term for ammonium hydroxide-soaked scrap meat ground into a pink paste, last August.
Until 2003, McDonald’s made its chicken nuggets similarly by processing everything into a slimy goop, then eliminating the bacteria with ammonia, adding flavor humans recognize as chicken-like before finally injecting artificial color to make it look like chicken. (It’s now made with actual white-meat chicken.)
Yuck!
Parents - You are sickening, maiming & killing your children by going to McDonalds & buying most foods there !
Watch this unsightly video from Oliver’s “Food Revolution” that shows how otherwise inedible meat reaches our tables thanks to the pink slime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wshlnRWnf30#!

Diet Soda A Day Linked With Higher Risk Of Stroke, Heart Attack

Diet Soda A Day Linked With Higher Risk Of Stroke, Heart Attack

Here's another reason why you might want to curb that diet soda addiction.

A new study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine shows that drinking diet soda every day is linked with a higher risk of stroke and heart attack.
Researchers from the Univ of Miami Miller School of Medicine and the Columbia Univ Medical Center examined the soda-drinking habits of 2,564 people who participated in the Northern Manhattan Study over a 10-year period.
The researchers found that people who reported drinking diet soda on a daily basis had a 43% higher risk of having a vascular event than people who didn't drink any soda, even when accounting for conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes.
However, researchers did find that people who tended to drink diet soda more occasionally -- between six a week and once a month -- and people who drank regular soda didn't have the increased risk of a vascular event.
Study researcher Hannah Gardener warned that more research is needed, but said in a statement that the "results suggest a potential association between daily diet soft drink consumption and vascular outcomes. However, the mechanisms by which soft drinks may affect vascular events are unclear." Gardener previously presented her findings last year at the International Stroke Conference.
Health.com reported that people who drink diet drinks -- not just soda -- don't just stop at one: They drink several of the drinks a day.

Health.com explained why people seem to be drawn to diet soda:
Although diet soda clearly isn't as addictive as a drug like nicotine, experts say the rituals that surround diet soda and the artificial sweeteners it contains can make some people psychologically -- and even physically -- dependent on it in ways that mimic more serious addictions. And unlike sugared soda, which will make you gain weight if you drink too much of it, zero-calorie soda doesn't seem to have an immediate downside that prevents people from overindulging.
Last year, a study presented at the American Diabetes Association meeting showed that drinking diet soda is linked with having a wider waistline.
"Data from this and other prospective studies suggest that the promotion of diet sodas and artificial sweeteners as healthy alternatives may be ill-advised," study researcher Helen P. Hazuda, Ph.D., a professor and chief of clinical epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio's School of Medicine, said in a statement. "They may be free of calories but not of consequences."

Place ONLY ORGANIC food & FILTERED water in your Body - OR Beware !

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Confessions of a Frustrated Pharmacist

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, Jan 30, 2012

Confessions of a Frustrated Pharmacist

by Stuart Lindsey, PharmD.

(OMNS, Jan 30, 2012) When an insider breaks ranks with pharmaceutical orthodoxy, it is time to take notice. "Whistleblower" may be an overused term, but the article that follows might be well worth readers' consideration before standing in line for their next prescription refill. - Andrew W. Saul, OMNS Editor
I'm a registered pharmacist. I am having a difficult time with my job. I sell people drugs that are supposed to correct their various health complaints. Some medicines work like they're supposed to, but many don't. Some categories of drugs work better than others. My concern is that the outcomes of treatment I observe are so unpredictable that I would often call the entire treatment a failure in too many situations.

How It Started - In 1993, I graduated with a BS in Pharmaceutical Sciences from University of New Mexico. I became pharmacy manager for a small independent neighborhood drug store. Starting in the year 2000, nutrition became an integral part of our business. The anecdotal feedback from the customers who started vitamin regimens was phenomenal. That same year, my PharmD clinical rotations began with my propensity for nutritional alternatives firmly in place in my mind. On the second day of my adultmedicine rotation, my preceptor at a nearby hospital informed me that he had every intention of beating this vitamin stuff out of me. I informed him that probably wouldn't happen. Three weeks later I was terminated from my rotations. The preceptor told my supervisor at UNM that there were acute intellectual differences that couldn't be accommodated in their program. What had I done? I was pressuring my preceptor to read an articlewritten by an MD at a hospital in Washington state that showed if a person comes into the emergency room with a yet to be diagnosed problem and is given a 3,000-4,000 mg bolus of vitamin C, that person's chance of dying over the next ten days in ICU dropped by 57%! [1]
One would think that someone who is an active part of the emergency room staff might find that an interesting statistic. His solution to my attempting to force him to read that article was having me removed from the program.
Pecking Order
The traditional role of the pharmacist in mainstream medicine is subordinate to the doctor. The doctor is responsible for most of the information that is received from and given to the patient. The pharmacist's responsibility is to reinforce the doctor's directions. The doctor and the pharmacist both want to have a positive treatment outcome, but there is a legally defined 'standard of care' looking over their shoulder.
The training that I received to become a PharmD motivated me to become more interested in these treatment outcomes. After refilling a patient's prescriptions a few times, it becomes obvious that the expected positive outcomes often simply don't happen. It's easy to take the low road and blame it on "poor compliance by the patient." I'm sure this can explain some treatment failure outcomes, but not all. Many (indeed most) drugs such as blood pressure regulators can require several adjustments of dose orcombination with alternative medicines before a positive outcome is obtained.
Wrong Drug; Wrong Disease
One drug misadventure is turning drugs that were originally designed for a rare (0.3% of the population) condition called Zollinger-Ellison syndrome into big pharma's treatment for occasional indigestion. These drugs are called proton-pump inhibitors (PPI). [2] After prolonged exposure to PPIs, the body's true issues of achlorhydria start to surface. [3]
These drugs are likely to cause magnesium deficiency, among other problems. Even the FDA thinks their long-term use is unwise. [4] The original instructions for these drugs were for a maximum use of six weeks . . . until somebody in marketing figured out people could be on the drugs for years. Drug usage gets even more complicated when you understand excessive use of antibiotics could be the cause of the initialindigestion complaints. What you get from inserting proton pump inhibitors into this situation is a gastrointestinal nightmare. A better course of medicine in this type of case might well be a bottle of probiotic supplements (or yogurt) and a few quarts of aloe-vera juice.
Many doctors are recognizing there are problems with overusing PPI's, but many still don't get it. An example of this is my school in NM had a lot of students going onto a nearby-impoverished area for rotations. They have blue laws in this area with no alcohol sales on Sunday. The students saw the pattern of the patients going into the clinics on Monday after abusing solvents, even gasoline vapors, and having the doctors put them on omeprazole (eg. Prilosec), long term, because their stomachs are upset. This is medicine in the real world.

Reliability or Bias?

Mainstream medicine and pharmacy instill into their practitioners from thebeginning to be careful about where you get your information. Medical journals boast of their peer review process. When you discuss with other health professionals, invariably they will ask from which medical journal did you get your information. I actually took an elective course in pharmacy on how to evaluate a particular article for its truthfulness. The class was structured on a backbone of caution about making sure, as one read an article, that we understand that real truthfulness only comes from a few approved sources. I was never comfortable with this concept. Once you realized that many of these "truthfulness bastions" actually have a hidden agenda, the whole premise of this course became suspect. One of my preceptors for my doctoral program insisted that I become familiar with a particular medical journal. If I did, she said, I would be on my way to understanding the "big picture." When I expressed being a little skeptical of thisjournal, the teacher told me I could trust it as the journal was non-profit, and there were no editorial strings attached.
Weirdly enough, what had started our exchange over credibility was a warm can of a diet soft drink on the teacher's desk. She drank the stuff all day. I was kidding around with her, and asked her if she had seen some controversial articles about the dangers of consuming quantities of aspartame. She scoffed at my conspiracy-theory laden point of view and I thought the subject was closed. The beginning of the next day, the teacher gave me an assignment: to hustle over to the medical library and make sure I read a paper she assured me would set me straight about my aspartame suspicions, while simultaneously demonstrating the value of getting my information from a nonprofit medical journal. It turned out that the article she wanted me to read, in the "nonprofit medical journal," was funded in its entirety by the Drug ManufacturersAssociation.


Flashy Pharma Ads

As I read the literature, I discovered that there is very decided barrier between two blocks of information: substances that can be patented vs. those substances that can't be. The can-be-patented group gets a professional discussion in eye-pleasing, four-color-print, art-like magazines. This attention to aesthetics tricks some people into interpreting, from the flashy presentation method, that the information is intrinsically truthful.
The world's drug manufacturers do an incredibly good job using all kinds of media penetration to get the word out about their products. The drug industry's audience used to be confined to readers of medical journals and trade publications. Then, in 1997, direct-to-consumer marketing was made legal. [5]
Personally, I don't think this kind of presentation should be allowed. I have doctor friends that saythey frequently have patients that self-diagnose from TV commercials and demand the doctor write them a prescription for the advertised product. The patients then threaten the doctor, if s/he refuses their request, that they will change doctors to get the medication. One of my doctor friends says he feels like a trained seal.

Negative Reporting on Vitamins

A vitamin article usually doesn't get the same glossy presentation. Frequently, questionable vitamin research will be published and get blown out of proportion. A prime example of this was the clamor in the press in 2008 that vitamin E somehow caused lung cancer. [6]
I studied this 2008 experiment [7] and found glaring errors in its execution. These errors were so obvious that the experiment shouldn't have gotten any attention, yet this article ended up virtually everywhere. Anti-vitamin spin requires this kind of research to be widely disseminated toshow how "ineffectual" and even "dangerous" vitamins are. I tracked down one of the article's original authors and questioned him about the failure to define what kind of vitamin E had been studied. A simple literature hunt shows considerable difference between natural and synthetic vitamin E. This is an important distinction because most of the negative articles and subsequent treatment failures have used the synthetic form for the experiment, often because it is cheap. Natural vitamin E with mixed tocopherols and tocotrienols costs two or three times more than the synthetic form.
Before I even got the question out of my mouth, the researcher started up, "I know, I know what you're going to say." He ended up admitting that they hadn't even considered the vitamin E type when they did the experiment. This failure to define the vitamin E type made it impossible to draw a meaningful conclusion. I asked the researcher if he realized how much damagethis highly quoted article had done to vitamin credibility. If there has been anything like a retraction, I have yet to see it.

Illness is Not Caused by Drug Deficiency

If you've made it this far in reading this article you have discerned that I'm sympathetic to vitamin arguments. I think most diseases are some form of malnutrition. Taking the position that nutrition is the foundation to disease doesn't make medicine any simpler. You still have to figure out who has what and why. There are many disease states that are difficult to pin down using the "pharmaceutical solution to disease." A drug solution is a nice idea, in theory. It makes the assumption that the cause of a disease is so well understood that a man-made chemical commonly called 'medicine' is administered, very efficiently solving the health problem. The reality though, is medicine doesn't understand most health problems very well. A person with a heart rhythm disturbance isnot low on digoxin. A child who is diagnosed with ADHD does not act that way because the child is low on Ritalin.By the same logic, a person with type II diabetes doesn't have a deficit of metformin. The flaw of medicine is the concept of managing (but not curing) a particular disease state. I'm hard pressed to name any disease state that mainstream medicine is in control of.

Voltaire allegedly said, "Doctors are men who pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into human beings of whom they know nothing." Maybe he overstated the problem. Maybe he didn't.


References:
1. Free full text paper at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1422648/pdf/20021200s00014p814.pdf
Also: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1422648/?tool=pubmed
2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2777040 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1697548
3. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21509344 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21731913
4. http://www.fda.gov/Safety/MedWatch/SafetyInformation/
SafetyAlertsforHumanMedicalProducts/ucm245275.htm
5. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa070502#t=articleResults
6. Media example: http://seniorjournal.com/NEWS/Nutrition-Vitamins/2008/8-02-29-VitaminEMay.htm .
OMNS' discussion at: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v04n18.shtml
7. Original articleat:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258445/?tool=pubmed or Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258445/pdf/AJRCCM1775524.pdf
Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information: http://www.orthomolecular.org
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