Two Potent Killers; Sugar and Pharmaceuticals

[Guest guest]

Two Potent Killers; Sugar and Pharmaceuticals

 

 

Dhttp://www.healthliesexposed.com/articles/article_2005_04_22_1528.shtml

 

4/22/05 Author: Greg Ciola and Pam Klebs

Interview

Dr. Carolyn Dean Source: Cruasdor Magazine

 

Two Potent Killers; Sugar and Pharmaceuticals

 

" First we feed them SUGAR...,Then we prescribe them

DRUGS! "

If one doesn't get you - The other just might!

 

" All truth passes through 3 stages. First, it is

ridiculed. Second, it

is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being

self-evident. "

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher,

believed will to live

is a fundamental reality.

 

 

 

Over the past 24 years, Dr. Carolyn Dean has practiced

as a medical

doctor, naturopath, acupuncturist, herbalist, and

homeopath. She has

discovered that a drug prescription, or an acupuncture

needle, or a

homeopathic remedy cannot take the place of eating

high quality foods,

participating in a consistent exercise program, and

eliminating those things

that are not supporting your healthiest potential.

 

 

 

There are two major health topics that Dr. Dean

speaks, writes, and

teaches on the dangers of Sugar and pharmaceutical

Drugs! In the early

1990s Dr. Dean came under heavy fire in Canada from

both the sugar

industry and the medical community for exposing

sugar’s connection to many

health problems. Dr. Dean was also recently

commissioned to compile a

report on the dangers of medicine by the Nutrition

Institute of America.

The report she put together, Death By Medicine, first

published by

health guru Gary Null, may quite possibly be one of

the harshest

condemnations of modern medicine and pharmaceutical

science you'll ever come

across.

 

 

 

Dr. Dean, who resides in New York, has built a

tremendous reputation

because of her abilities to help many chronically ill

patients using

natural methods. She is a true pioneer in natural

health and we have the

utmost respect for her work. Dr. Dean sits on the

boards of the

Children's Movement for Creative Expression and the

Canadian College of

Naturopathic Medicine. She is a regular guest on the

radio show Hickey Chemists

Radio Hour (www.hickeychemists.com) and occasionally

appears on the

popular morning TV show, The View. Dr. Dean is also a

consultant and

writer for Natural Health Magazine. She has published

many books including:

Natural Prescriptions for Common Ailments, Homeopathic

Remedies for

Children's Common Ailments, Menopause Naturally, The

Miracle of Magnesium,

Everything Alzheimer's and is currently working on

Hormone Balance, and

Mercury Madness. She has just written a chapter in

Nancy Appleton's

soon-to-be-released book, Inflammation. Dr. Dean also

consults for various

organizations including: www.curesnaturally.com,

www.yeastconnection.com, www.brcleanse.com,

www.friendsoffreedom.org.

 

 

 

Greg: Carolyn, why don’t you begin by telling us about

your background?

How did you get involved in both medicine and

naturopathy?

 

 

 

Sure, Greg. My husband and I are both from Nova

Scotia. When we were

young, in our late teens, we traveled a lot on the

West coast of the U.S.

and I bumped into the health movement down in L.A. I

guess a lot of

people were traveling around at that time into the

hippie scene and drugs,

but we were actually into health and nutrition so I

met many of the

greats. There were lectures at that time by Emmanuel

Cheraskin, MD, DMD,

Adele Davis, Pavvo Airola, and all the health freedom

fighters of that

era. I was inspired. I began to do a lot of reading. I

became very

interested in the health movement. After traveling for

several years I went

back to Dalhousie University in Halifax and studied

Honors Biology. I

was trying to decide whether or not I wanted to end up

working for the

Department of the Environment. This was in the early

70s, just as the

ecology movement was starting. So I decided to try a

summer job with them

and found out they didn’t have a clue what they were

doing. At the same

time I was writing my MCAT exams and applying to

medical school. I had

seen my peers in biology classes who got accepted into

medical school

in the spring of that year and I realized that I knew

a heck of a lot

more than they did so I applied to medical school, got

in the next year

and the rest is history. Partly, I was frustrated

trying to tell people

about health and nutrition. As a layperson, they

wouldn’t listen to me

so I thought: “Well, I’ll get my medical degree and

then they’ll have

to listen.” And I think that was a good move because

people do listen to

doctors and, unfortunately, they listen to them

thinking they know

everything. Doctors think that they know everything

because that’s what

they are taught in medical school. We are given such

an overwhelming

amount of information and responsibility and are

actually told: “Look, if

you haven’t heard it, then it is not true. If you

haven’t learned it in

medical school then it doesn’t exist.” Even at that

time in the mid 70s

there was a lot of anti-chiropractic and anti-health

food faddism. It

was sort of worked into our lectures. I remember one

time after I read

a magazine series that Gary Null put out on cancer I

was quite blown

away. I had been reading Prevention magazine, (as I

said, I was already

into health) and I tried to bring up certain things

that I would read in

Prevention magazine. For example, during a pediatrics

lecture, I told

the clinician and the class that I had just read about

a study that

proved that breast milk was better than bottled

formula for infants. The

pediatrician laughed in my face, called me “Bubbles”

and said, “Oh,

that’s impossible. Baby formula has been perfected to

mimic mother’s milk,

it’s just as good.” I was totally put down. Two weeks

later when he had

finally caught up on his reading and found the article

himself, he

apologized but it was to the wrong class.

 

 

 

The arrogance of doctors is kind of built into the

whole system. They

are told that they know everything. And you’ll hear

that even from the

public: “Well, if vitamins are so important, if diet

is so important,

how come my doctor doesn’t know it?” Or, “How come my

doctor isn’t

telling me?” There’s this whole disconnect between

health and wellness and

disease. Medicine teaches disease care. With the aging

population, a

population with chronic diseases and a population

eating a bad diet, not

exercising, and having a lot of pollutants in their

air, food and water,

what we need is wellness care and medicine is

absolutely rock bottom in

this knowledge about wellness care. Anyway, that’s my

introductory

statement.

 

 

 

Greg: You actually had your own clinic up in Canada?

 

 

 

Yes. I started my private practice in 1979 in Toronto

and it was, for

the most part, a natural medicine practice.

 

 

 

Greg: How did you get from Nova Scotia to Toronto?

 

 

 

Toronto by way of Hamilton, Ontario. What happened was

I actually did

my clinical clerkship year there, which would have

been my third year of

medicine at McMaster University; my husband was

working with the famous

Canadian communications theorist, Marshall McLuhan.

Since my husband

wanted to be up near Marshall I did something unheard

of. They had never

transferred a Canadian medical student from one school

to another

before. It’s amazing how rigid they are; they didn’t

think anyone could

survive it. At Dalhousie University we had the

strictest medical school in

North America. Our second year exams included the

third year American

Board exams and we had to pass those in order to pass

our second year.

When I went to my clerkship year in McMaster, they

were on a tutorial

system so all the McMaster students were cramming for

finals and I just

hung out in the wards the whole time and learned a

considerable amount

of clinic work. The next year I went to my internship

in Toronto at Mt.

Sinai and I knew things the residents didn’t even

know. During my

internship I started studying Naturopathic medicine

for my Naturopathic

degree. As soon as I went into practice, which was two

weeks after I

graduated from medical school, I started practicing

natural medicine. I

pretty much practiced then as a Naturopath but I was

practicing under my

medical license. When I had to use a drug or refer

someone, then I would

be able to do that as a medical doctor. If any of my

patients ever had

to have surgery then I would go in on the surgery with

them. For the

most part we were able to help keep our patients away

from surgery but if

it came to that, for whatever reason, I was able to go

in and comfort

my patients because there’s so much abuse that occurs

in surgery. I

remember during my internship I would be in on

surgeries and the doctor

would say, “Oh well, I don’t think I can save this

ovary, she doesn’t need

it anyway.” I kind of challenged the doctors to avoid

doing things like

this when I thought it wasn’t necessary, but I was

very sweet about it

and I did it in a round about way where I wasn’t

directly challenging

them. It was nothing more than someone just cajoling

them or challenging

them a little bit and it took another fifteen minutes

and it would save

the woman’s ovaries. This is the regard that some of

these doctors had

for patients, especially women’s body parts.

 

 

 

Greg: Let me pick up on something that I found

astounding. I heard that

back in the early 1990s you came under very harsh

criticism and

scrutiny from the Canadian sugar industry and the

medical establishment for

making statements on the bad effects sugar has on the

body. What can you

tell us about this?

 

 

 

I was on the Deni Petty show and the topic was sugar.

It was December

11, 1989 and it was a Christmas show. I usually have

fun when I do TV

and I brought along my props, a couple of boxes of

sugar. I spooned out

the 10 teaspoons of sugar that would be in a can of

pop and I spooned

out the 27 teaspoons that would be in a milkshake and

the audience was

just gasping. At the time I was writing a sugar book

so I had hundreds of

references and could talk about the epidemiology and

how societies

where there was no refined sugar were healthy, had

perfect teeth, no heart

disease, no bowel disease, etc. but within a decade to

fifteen years

after the introduction of sugar, people were getting

diabetes and all the

chronic diseases that we are suffering with. Maybe not

on this

particular show, but I often talk about the Pottenger

Cat Study that involved

900 cats in several different groups to determine what

effects processed

foods would have on them. One group was fed just

cooked meat and milk;

I

don’t think they even did a sugar study with the

cats. The study

showed that just cooking the meat and milk and feeding

it to animals that

need more raw foods with enzymes led to no more live

births by the fourth

generation. I compare the Pottenger cats to our eating

habits because

we’re in the third generation of eating a chronically

devitalized diet.

So what’s our legacy? Look at how many fertility

clinics we have today.

There is so much invitro fertilization and so many

fertility drugs

used. Doesn’t that tell us that our fertility is in

jeopardy? We have sperm

counts that are plummeting because of the

xenoestrogens and the

chemicals in the environment so we are on a rapid

downward decline. Dr. Doris

Rapp in her recent book, Our Toxic World, says that in

50 years there

will be no more live births in the human population

because the sperm

count is going to be down to zero.

 

 

 

Greg: With regard to the sugar issue, we try and

educate people on this

front as well but most people are totally clueless as

to the role sugar

plays in disease. They think that it’s something safe

and that they can

use it in moderation.

 

 

 

What happens with the sugar issue is you run up

against several things.

These begin with the sugar industry and then go into

advertising and

then into the marketing of so much of the processed

food in North America

that depends on sugar. Sugar is very cheap and it’s

used to satisfy our

taste buds so we will buy something that is probably

inferior in

quality but tastes good. It’s also so cheap that it’s

used as a filler for a

lot of processed foods. That’s why you find sugar in

almost every

processed food you pick up. Just read the labels and

you’ll see. Rather than

putting more of the product in a food, they will just

add sugar and it

lessens the cost to the manufacturer, not to the

consumer. The sugar

industry started with the slave trade. It has a very

negative history and

from there it went from people just using a few pounds

a year to over

150 pounds a year in 2003 according to Nancy Appleton

who wrote the book

Lick The Sugar Habit.

 

 

 

Greg: I have that book from Nancy here in my library.

She has done some

terrific work. On her web site she actually lists over

124 different

reasons why sugar may be ruining your health.

 

 

 

There are many reasons to stay away from sugar along

with numerous

studies to support them. I’m doing a chapter in

Nancy’s new book on

inflammation. Sugar, according to the sugar industry,

only causes dental

decay. They will not admit that it causes anything

else. For one of the

books I am writing right now, I looked at the American

Diabetes Association

web site and they say that we still don’t know the

cause of diabetes. I

can quote it exactly: “The cause of diabetes continues

to be a mystery

although both genetic and environmental factors such

as obesity and

lack of exercise appear to play roles.” So,

foundations like the American

Diabetes Association, which are blatantly supported by

drug companies,

will obfuscate the true cause of disease and the

public never gets the

message. They should be screaming the truth from the

tops of high

buildings. A line I use when I talk is, “We are what

we eat and if we’re

eating all this junk food then we are cheap, fast, and

easy.” Around the

topic of 10 teaspoons of sugar in a can of pop I also

tell people that

there are only one to two teaspoons in your whole

body, in your whole

bloodstream, at any one moment. So, if you have one or

two teaspoons in

your blood and you hit it with 10 teaspoons, it throws

everything out

of whack. Then I say, “Is the person in charge of our

mouths insane?” It

really is insanity.

 

 

 

One of the first things I recommend in all my lectures

is for people to

completely eliminate all forms of sugar from their

diet. There are no

exceptions. Sugar disrupts all body chemistry; it

severely weakens the

immune system, and is implicated in a number of health

problems

including diabetes, allergies, heart disease and

obesity. Sugar upsets the

balance of minerals, increases triglycerides,

interferes with the

absorption of calcium and magnesium, weakens eyesight,

causes tooth decay,

impairs the structure of DNA, causes free radicals,

damages and

over-stresses the pancreas, makes bones brittle,

causes depression, and slows down

the functioning ability of the adrenals, just to list

a few. The

problem is getting people off of this highly addictive

and damaging

substance. Our society is literally addicted to sugar.

Sugar can come from a

number of different sources as well, so unless you’re

aware of what to

avoid it’s still possible to overwhelm your system

with sugar without even

knowing it. When I tell people to eliminate sugar I'm

referring to all

table sugar and all packaged goods that list sugar,

cane juice, beet

sugar, fructose, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup,

maltodextrin,

maple syrup, barley malt, and rice syrup.

 

 

 

 

 

Pam: I use the analogy that our pancreas is like a

muscle. In

bodybuilding, an athlete can rip or tear a muscle if

it is overworked. In the

same manner, the over consumption of sugar can

overwork the pancreas,

making it vulnerable to a variety of problems.

 

 

 

Many people have really ruined their pancreases. We’re

being

overwhelmed with advertising for all these processed

and artificial products but

the advertisers refuse to let the true information

about diet come to

the fore. In March of this year the director of the

CDC, Dr. Julie

Gerberding, MD, and a group of co-workers wrote a

paper with a group of

other people titled “Actual Causes of Death in the

United States, 2000.”

They list deaths from tobacco at 435,000 and diet and

lack of physical

activity at 400,000. So they’re coming right out and

saying it. Now, I

think they are saying that in part because they’re

giving up and they are

now trying to blame the people for eating wrong. They

haven’t put out

any guidelines over the past few decades telling

people to cut back on

sugar and white flour products and now, all of a

sudden, they act like

this epidemic of obesity, syndrome X, metabolic

syndrome and diabetes

came out of the clear blue sky, whereas, it does take

time to build. Ten

years ago when we started seeing children at age 10

and 12 developing

adult onset diabetes, it should have told us

something. It is exactly

like in anthropological studies where the introduction

of white flour

and white sugar into a “virgin” community causes

diabetes in ten to

fifteen years. The same thing is happening with our

children. They’re

sucking on sodas from age 1 and 2. You see it all the

time. It is an

incredible pacifier. We have the pacifier of sugar,

which makes us sick, and we

have the pacifier of TV, which tells us, “You can eat

all the crap you

want and if you have symptoms, then you can get a drug

for it.”

 

 

 

Pam: Society has normalized all sorts of symptoms.

Now, PMS is normal.

Menopausal problems are normal. Headaches are normal.

Acne is normal.

So many conditions are considered normal today that

consumers have no

clue that they can get well, hence the sedation.

 

 

 

And then they pathologize the natural. Menopause is

pathologized. I’m

currently writing a book on hormone balance and I came

across this new

perimenopause condition. My friend Susun Weed has

written a great book

on menopause called Menopausal Years. She goes to

women’s conferences on

this subject all the time. On a panel at a recent

conference she told

me there was an older gynecologist who didn’t like the

fact that women

were saying, “Look, take charge of your body and talk

about your hot

flashes as being power surges.” The condescending

approach of medicine

toward women with menopause started with the book

Feminine Forever by

Robert A. Wilson. He was hired by the makers of

Premarin to write this book

and promote the fact that menopause is a dreaded

disease where women

will lose their femininity and that they need Premarin

in order to stay

young and pliant for their men. So Hormone Replacement

Therapy (HRT) has

been perpetuated around these myths. Susun said this

was exactly the

attitude of the gynecologist on the panel. He thought

it was so sad

that women had to go through the horrors of menopause

and they needed

these synthetic drugs, though we know, since the

Women’s Health Initiative

studies in 2002, that both estrogen and progesterone

in conjugated and

synthetic forms are harmful and do not prevent

disease. So what this

gynecologist said was, “I’ll take the wind out of your

sails. I’m going

to invent a new term called perimenopause.” I don’t

know the exact

dialogue but he said women are having problems even

before menopause and I’m

going to invent this new term and you will have to

deal with that. So,

now women are pathologized with PMS, perimenopause,

and menopause; it’s

never ending. Anyway, perimenopause is an invented

disease and sure

enough, there have been thousands of papers written on

perimenopause.

What’s really happening in perimenopause is the

environment is catching up

with our hormones. Women don’t have a read out on the

chemical effects

on them like men do. A man’s sperm count is reduced

and that can be

measured. With women, we are just going through a lot

more PMS symptoms,

a lot more early menopause, a lot more polycystic

ovarian syndrome and

all of these factors are related to high sugar intake,

xenoestrogen

chemicals, and obesity.

 

 

 

Pam: One of my favorite lines that I tell people is,

“It costs you

nothing to remove sugar from your life. It is

absolutely free of charge.

Supplements cost money, let’s just remove sugar and

see what

happens.†Nine times out of ten people come to me

and say: “I did. I cut

out the sugar and my symptoms when away.†It’s

similar to classical

conditioning. I always emphasize remove the sugar

first and foremost.

 

 

 

Very good. That’s excellent.

 

 

 

Pam: They get it especially when you tell them it

doesn’t cost

anything.

 

 

 

That’s a perfect marketing strategy.

 

 

 

Pam: I try and come up with anything to help them. It

comes from the

cognitive (understanding) and then doing it.

 

 

 

I was trying to break into the businesswomen’s world

and I attended a

businesswomen’s spa down in Puerto Rico in January

of this year. I

thought, “Great! Women in power, women in charge,

women are responsible

for 95% of the diet and medical and healthcare in the

family. I’ll be

able to influence them and save the world!†So I

gave my presentation

and the feedback I got from several women was, “I

really don’t have

time to do all the stuff you recommend but I can drink

more water.â€

Like your sugar analogy, Pam, you can only get them to

do one thing. The

only thing these women thought they could “manageâ€

was to buy a few

more bottles of water a day and drink them. And

that’s the state

we’re at where people think they have to be sped up

to the max instead of

moving to a four or three-day work week like I was

told was going to

happen when I was growing up. It’s a seven-day work

week now, with both

parents or partners working, etc. We’ve really

locked into such

a commercialized world that it is affecting us on all

levels and none

of it for the good.

 

 

 

Greg: Let me go back to the sugar issue again. Your

stance on it in

Canada, even though it wasn’t that radical, got you

into hot water. Can

you tell our readers more about what happened after

you did that show and

the attack that you came under for your stance?

 

 

 

This program was a national TV talk show. A lot of

people watched this

show. I guess it was a few months later that I got a

letter from my

college of physicians and surgeons saying that there

was a complaint

against me by a sugar lobby group. Now, the college is

supposed to protect

the public from doctors who might do them harm and as

I understand it,

they aren’t supposed to bend to industry. Even though

I presented the

book I was writing, which was mostly finished by then,

and stated my case

about the veracity of my statements, they continued on

to admonish me.

They wrote that I was admonished for making

unsupported statements

about sugar on a national TV show and that sugar only

causes dental

cavities. So, in fact, the medical establishment was

supporting sugar against

the public interest. And now we have an epidemic of

obesity, diabetes,

syndrome X, and metabolic syndrome all primed by

sugar. Finally in 2004

the World Health Organization made a recommendation

that people cut

their

sugar intake down to 10% from the American

“allowance” of the 25% of

the diet. Now that has caused the sugar industry in

America to go crazy.

They are absolutely furious that the World Health

Organization is

taking this stance and are actually lobbying the

American government to

withhold funding from the World Health Organization if

they go through with

these recommendations.

 

 

 

Greg: Well you know what? We’re in a dilemma in either

case because

they have put out these recommendations and we’re

starting to see a move

against sugar, unfortunately, the move is leading

people to all these

artificial sweeteners like aspartame, neotame,

acesulfame K, etc. It’s a

travesty what’s happening. So, people will give up

sugar only to get

poisoned with another toxic chemical. It’s pathetic!

 

 

 

Yeah. You’re perfectly right and in a big article I

wrote for Natural

Health Magazine a few years back about sugar and

sweeteners, I talked

about aspartame and yet, I believe on the American

Diabetes Association

site they still are recommending aspartame even though

we know for sure

it causes dozens of side effects, up to and including

death.

 

 

Greg: And the Diabetes Association, from what I

understand, has dietary

guidelines that are still based around consuming sugar

and simple

carbohydrates from refined and processed foods. They

don’t tell people to

completely eliminate sugar in order to get rid of

diabetes. If the

diabetic diet were so good, why are people still

diabetic?

 

 

 

I know they rely on the glycemic index where they say,

“Oh look, sugar

doesn’t have that bad of a glycemic index.” But it’s

entirely because

they are supported and promoted by food companies and

drug companies.

They’ve lost all touch with the reality of natural

foods. Now, it may be

entirely financial but it also may be because they

don’t have a clue

that what you put into your body creates your body.

They don’t seem to

have clue that every function in the body requires a

co-factor, which is

usually a vitamin or mineral.

 

 

 

Pam: In his book Sugar Blues, William Duffy was

correct in saying that

sugar was an anti-nutrient and, of course, he was

attacked for that. In

other words, consuming sugar is actually

counter-productive. You take

in calories, but it drains nutrients out of your body.

 

 

 

So if you eat food that doesn’t have any vitamins and

minerals, doesn’t

have any live enzymes, is completely dead, then it’s

not only not

giving you anything, it’s also taking the vitamins and

minerals from your

body in order to break it down. You have this constant

drain on your

system. I learned this very clearly when I was writing

my magnesium book,

The Miracle of Magnesium. Magnesium is required for

350 different

enzymes in the body, which produce thousands of

different functions in the

body. If you don’t have magnesium, which is very

easily depleted from

soils and is burnt off when you process or cook food,

you end up eating a

diet that is very deficient in magnesium. If you don’t

replace it by

eating a lot of fresh green leafy vegetables, nuts,

seeds, and whole

grains, then you’re deficient and along comes all the

osteoporosis and

heart disease and muscle problems and stress that

everyone is suffering

from.

 

 

 

Greg: Carolyn let me switch gears and pick up on

another topic. What’s

your involvement with the health freedom movement in

Canada and the

lawsuits going on against Health Canada? I understand

Canada has some very

restrictive laws that are being challenged in the

courts and you’re

going to be an expert witness in the case?

 

 

 

I was up in Canada in March of this year and I

happened to be in town

for some other business and there was a big health

convention going on.

Hulda Clark was supposed to be there and then she

couldn’t so they

asked me to fill in. I was on a health panel on

“Health Politics” so I was

asked to speak about Death by Medicine, the major

report I wrote

recently for the Nutrition Institute of America. After

hearing me speak about

Death by Medicine statistics Trueman Tuck from The

Friends of Freedom

organization came up to me. I had heard of The Friends

of Freedom before

but I didn’t know Trueman, and we hit it off very

nicely. Right off the

bat he said, “You know, I think you’d be an important

expert witness

when we go up against Health Canada, which is trying

to make a ruling

that nutrients should be treated like drugs.” And that

is the issue.

Health Canada has declared anything more than 10,000

units of Vitamin A is a

drug. Carnitine is a drug, tryptophan is a drug, and

yohimbe is a drug.

In allowing Health Canada to get away with that

position, it means we

are giving up our freedom of access to nutrients and

it opens the door

for Codex to come in and declare that anything above

the RDA is a drug.

On June 22, legal action was initiated by The Friends

of Freedom

against Health Canada for defining nutrients as drugs

to include nutrients to

the detriment of public health.

 

 

 

Greg: Your report Death by Medicine, which you just

mentioned, is

another issue that I wanted to get into with you. I

think that’s one of the

best presentations I have ever come across. It’s like

a dagger in the

heart of the pharmaceutical industry because it shows

facts, figures and

statistics from their own medical journals about

what’s happening out

there. What was the impetus for you to even write that

story?

 

 

 

At the time I was having some interaction with Gary

Null and he asked

me to find data on iatrogenesis (symptoms or illness

brought on by

something a doctor does or says). Gary said over the

years he had tried over

and over again to get people to do a full accounting

of all the

iatrogenic statistics and they could never come up

with the numbers that he

really felt were out there. I am always up for a

challenge and at the

time I was going back and forth between New York and

Nova Scotia because

my mother was dying of acute leukemia, probably from

two drugs she was

taking, an anti-hypertensive drug and one of the

anti-lupus drugs. I

basically had cleared my schedule and in a three-week

period I was able to

scramble together all these facts, put together

several different

charts, do the calculations, and create the paper that

you see.

 

 

 

Greg: Well, I’m looking at the report right now and I

see you cover a

wide range of different topics. One is medication

errors. I don’t know

how much of this information you can recall off the

top of your head for

this interview but if you want to get into some of

that, I think it

would be very interesting for our readers. Why don’t

you cover some of the

different topics that you go into in that story?

 

 

 

There is so much groundwork to be covered in a topic

like this and in

our “sound byte” society people never stop long enough

to find out why

things are the way they are. For example, antibiotic

overuse.

Antibiotics have been promoted commercially for so

long that everybody feels,

“Well, anytime I get sick all I need is an

antibiotic.” And now the CDC is

trying to get people to cut back on antibiotics and

they are having a

heck of a time because doctors say patients demand

them. There is this

co-conspiracy here because doctors want to give

something to someone who

has a problem and people want to take them. But

doctors haven’t been

trained in alternatives to antibiotics. They only know

about prescribing

antibiotics so they are in a real bind. They keep

giving them out and

patients keep taking them.

 

 

 

Greg: Most people are so conditioned by the system

that any time they

come down with a cold, the flu or a cough, they run

straight to their

doctor as if they have some magic pill in their back

pocket that is going

to make them better. They all leave the doctor with a

prescription when

if they let the cold or flu or cough run its course,

it would probably

be gone just as quickly, if not quicker.

 

 

 

We are living in a duct-tape mentality society, aren’t

we? We know, in

the nutritional end of things, that antibiotics don’t

treat a virus.

They just can’t. They are incapable. But back in 1995,

the head of the

CDC, Dr. Richard Besser said that the number of

unnecessary antibiotics

prescribed annually for viral infections was 20

million. Eight years

later he refers to the tens of millions of unnecessary

antibiotics. We

haven’t come any closer to slowing down the use of

them. Go to the CDC

site where they have a program called “Get Smart: Know

When Antibiotics

Work”. It’s a $1.6 million campaign to educate

patients about the overuse

and inappropriate use of antibiotics. And what do they

tell people?

They just say, “Don’t use them. Drink water. Wash your

hands.” They won’t

go near anything that looks like alternatives. They

won’t say there

have been studies about Vitamin C, Echinacea,

astragalus, or even garlic.

Another huge piece of work that I did for Gary was a

cross-index of

nutrients and all of the vitamin research. Let me go

to Gary’s site

and find it for you because that shows the thousands

of studies that have

been done on nutrients. If anyone ever says to you,

“Well, there isn’t

any research on alternatives so how can I go there?”

Tell them there

are half a million studies when you look at just fifty

nutrients and do

PubMed searches on those fifty nutrients. Add up the

figures…it could be

animal research, bench research, or human research.

The total number is

half a million studies on nutrients that have been

done. To say that

there are no studies is very disingenuous. On the Gary

Null site

(www.garynull.com) it is called Codex research. It’s a

comprehensive nutrient

review that confirms the safety and efficacy of

numerous nutrients.

 

 

Greg: I’m still on Gary’s site with the drug story

that you did. On

adverse effects, it says: “In a New England Journal of

Medicine study an

alarming 1 in 4 patients suffered observable side

effects from the more

than 3.34 billion prescriptions filled in 2002.”

That’s unbelievable.

One in four! That means 25% of the people who take a

prescription drug

are highly likely to have an observable side effect.

Is that correct?

 

 

 

Yes. And if you will read further in the paper I talk

about how doctors

are not trained in how to diagnose side effects. A

different study

found that one of the reasons for the failure of

reporting side effects is

that in nearly two-thirds of the cases doctors

couldn’t diagnose side

effects, or the side effects persisted because the

doctor failed to heed

the warning signs. What often happens with drugs, as I

learned in my

magnesium research, is that drugs will drain out

important nutrients like

magnesium and when side effects come up, sometimes the

side effects

appear like the disease itself so doctors will

actually give more of the

drug. I have heard over the years that they aren’t

side effects; they

are the effects of the drugs. This is what these drugs

do.

 

 

 

Pam: It makes a doctor look really smart. In other

words, you go in,

you get the prescription, the doctor tells you that

you might get

constipated, you might get gas, you might get a skin

rash, your hair might

fall out, and when all those things happen you think,

“Boy is my doctor

ever smart. He told me these things were going to

happen”. In the words

of a holistic medical doctor I met once: “The side

effects are the

effect”.

 

 

 

Greg: Well, I’ll tell you, until people realize they

are being fleeced

by this whole industry they are never going to get to

the point. That’s

why I think your report is so powerful.

 

 

 

It’s probably too in-your-face. It’s good to put it in

the context of

an interview, otherwise it comes across like hammers

and nails and I

think that sort of turns people off. But at the same

time they have to

know the truth. Around the time I wrote this report,

Rosemary Black in

Washington wrote a book called The Wall of Silence

about the face of

iatrogenesis and she tells me that she is being asked

to speak at

university, government, and public conferences. I

think it’s because it’s a

little easier for people to swallow personal stories

rather than the hard

statistics. I don’t know because Death by Medicine has

certainly not

gotten any popular press.

 

 

 

Greg: Well, I could see why. Obviously if any of the

big media picked

up on this story it would hurt the pharmaceutical

industry. The media

would not want to pick up on this report because they

are all making big

money with advertising. You’ve got statistics here

that say from the

year 1996 to the year 2000 spending rose from $791

million to nearly $2.5

billion but you say that even though $2.5 billion may

seem like a lot

of money the authors comment that it only represents

15% of the total

pharmaceutical advertising budget. We are looking at

an industry that is

throwing billions and billions of dollars to

magazines, television,

radio, any print media that you can find and so, of

course, they are not

going to want to pick up on a story like this. They

are making money off

this industry. It would not be in their best interest

to support what

you’re doing.

 

 

 

Yes. It’s very commercial and it is very sad that

disease is such big

business, that we’ve lost sight of the fact that

people do want to be

well and they don’t want to be guinea pigs in this

disease market.

 

 

 

Pam: Have you noticed a change in the commercials on

TV for the

pharmaceuticals? For instance, as Dorothy Hammill is

skating in a commercial

for the drug Vioxx, the viewer has to guess what the

drug is for. You

never actually hear that it may be for pain. There she

is skating around

as the commercial is telling you how wonderful Vioxx

is. It is just

suggested that it may be for pain because she is

moving, she is an

athlete, she is getting up there in age and so on. The

change that has gone on

in the pharmaceutical domain is that the ad doesn’t

have to reveal the

side effects of a drug as long as the ad doesn’t say

what it’s for. On

the other hand, if the ad tells you what the drug is

for, they have to

declare the side effects somewhere in the ad (either

by voice or small

print). It has been going on for the last three or

four years, maybe a

little bit longer. That is so manipulative.

 

 

 

Greg: I am astounded when I watch the evening news

from 6:30 to 7:00.

It doesn’t matter which channel, ABC, NBC, CBS – you

see an average of

5 to 7 commercials in that half-hour period for drugs.

 

 

 

I was just saying to my husband the other day on every

block there’s

a drug store. There are an incredible number of drug

stores in

Manhattan. In my Death by Medicine paper, I talk of

Dr. Sydney Wolfe who is a

real hero, the founder of the Public Citizen health

research group. He

says that the public is totally misinformed about

these drug ads. People

want what they see on television and are told to go to

their doctor for

prescriptions and I think doctors in private practice

either acquiesce

to their patient’s demands or spend valuable clinic

time trying to

talk their patients out of unnecessary drugs. But Dr.

Wolfe remarked that

one important study found that people mistakenly

believe that the FDA

reviews all ads before they are released and allows

only the safest and

most effective drugs to be promoted directly to the

public. There is no

such thing.

 

 

 

Greg: That’s a complete lie!

 

 

 

We now know that all drugs are going to cause some

sort of negative

effect on the body. That’s why I learned about

Naturopathic medicine

alternatives and choices so that I could use other

things besides drugs. I

believe when you write a prescription you’re going

against the medical

code of “First, do no harm.” As soon as you write a

prescription, there

is a 25% chance of an observable side effect. What

about un-observable

side effects that build up?

 

 

 

Greg: You feel it is against the Hippocratic Oath?

 

 

 

Yes, which is “First, do no harm.”

 

 

 

Greg: And you now feel it is against your belief

system to write

prescriptions.

 

 

 

Yes. I was happy to write them when I had to. I was

happy that I had a

license to write them but I found that I very rarely

had to write

prescriptions because there are so many alternatives.

That’s where so many

doctors are in a bind because they don’t learn about

any alternative

choices in medical school so they are left with only a

prescription pad in

hand and a pharmaceutical industry that is only too

happy to tell them

what to write. Now we’re hearing stories about drug

companies sending

checks, you know, actually bribing doctors to use

their products.

 

 

 

Pam: Well absolutely. It happens with farmers in the

chemical world

too. They get lured in. I have heard stories where a

doctor is told: “If

you get 12 patients on Prozac this month then you are

going to qualify

for a vacation or a new set of golf clubs or

whatever.” And then all of

a sudden you are sitting in the waiting room and you

are patient number

12, so automatically, before you walk in the door, you

are on Prozac.

It’s senseless. And I know the farmers have the same

problem. They are

told by the chemical companies that if they buy so

many fertilizers,

that they can qualify for some kind of incentive.

 

 

 

Yeah. It’s kind of the standard business practices of

finding customers

without any ethics or honesty. One story that people

can’t believe is

that I had to start the first ethics course in my

medical school. This

famous, tough medical school in 1974 didn’t even have

an ethics course

let alone an ethics department! I started one with

another student at

lunchtime. The administration was so embarrassed they

took it over.

 

 

 

Pam: In terms of buying doctors prescription pads, I

don’t know how

much of that is still going on Carolyn. I don’t know

what you hear…

 

 

 

In Italy there is a huge lawsuit going on, but I

recently heard about

it being exposed now in North America where one

company is paying

$10,000 to doctors for prescribing their drugs.

 

 

 

Pam: So it’s like buying shelf space in the grocery

store?

 

 

 

Yes. I found this article regarding a lawsuit with a

doctor in

Pennsylvania who was hired to root out fraud, abuse

and waste within the State

Department of Public Welfare and was fired for doing

just that. He is

suing the Federal Government right now. I don’t really

“believe” in

litigation but I am backing the litigation that we are

pursuing in Canada

and I am their expert medical witness because it seems

that the only way

to get attention on these issues is to bring them to

court, expose

them, and have the people understand what’s going on

and have a ruling

made.

 

 

 

Pam: It’s sad that it takes that much complication to

get the truth to

the people. I know Greg is a big student of the Bible.

The Ten

Commandments are considered the “laws” and what we

have to deal with beyond

biblical laws are the statutes, man-made laws. For

example, we are working

with the organic farmers here in the Midwest trying to

get raw milk to

the people. Sally Fallon is the big proponent of that

and I agree with

her. If something is going to help people get well,

like raw milk from

grass-fed cows, why is it so difficult to obtain? It

shouldn’t be that

way. My dairy farmer recently had to go through

litigation to protect

what I feel is his right to provide a healing food

(raw milk) to the

people. We can go to a restaurant and buy food that is

full of trans fats

which kill us, but it’s difficult for us to buy a

healing food like raw

milk. In a book that Sally Fallon just published, “The

Untold Story of

Milk”, by Ron Schmid, ND, he writes that the benefits

of raw milk were

well known at the turn of the last century.

 

 

 

That can be said of so much of our food supply. We

keep hearing so many

confusing things about food but I think if we go back

to organic

non-GMO fruits, vegetables, grains, free-range meat

and poultry, and raw milk

without all the adulterants, maybe we would have a

chance. When I am in

Europe and eat even bread and cheese, which I avoid

here, I can eat

them because they don’t have the additives. I think

they allow only a few

dozen additives whereas in the U.S. we have thousands

of them.

 

 

 

Greg: For whatever reason, America has been the target

for everything

that is going bad in the world, whether it is with

pharmaceutical drugs,

genetic engineering, or the corruption and

adulteration of natural

foods by turning them into refined, processed garbage.

 

 

It’s big business. We became the bastion of capitalism

and so there is

this need for technology, this demand for technology.

We just accept

any new innovation without any restriction. That’s

where the work of

media scientist, Marshall McLuhan, comes in when he

warned us that we would

become our environment. The media we have created –

they are not just

the news media, they are every extension of us into

the world. Every

new technology we have created becomes us so now we

are acting like

machines. We just go along with whatever is put in

front of us, eat

synthetic food, work insane hours, sit in front of a

mind-numbing radiating

television screen or computer screen for hours and

hours. We listen to our

machines, we cater to our machines, and we are

changing into these

synthetic beings. My husband says we have four bodies

now: the TV body, the

Internet body, the chemical body, and the astral body.

In medicine I

keep trying to influence the chemical body, which is

like the physical

body. However, it’s so busy “ingesting” the content

of TV and the

Internet that the physical body has taken a back seat

and is losing its

health as a result.

 

 

 

Greg: Carolyn, what I find interesting is the fact

that you are an M.D.

You don’t usually see a medical doctor taking the

strong positions

against the entire medical system as you have. When

you look back at the

attack you came under in Canada for speaking out

against sugar, are you

concerned you might come under the same kind of

criticism and attack

from the medical community and pharmaceutical industry

for writing Death

By Medicine?

 

 

 

You’ve got to figure when you go outside the box 50%

of the people are

going to hate you and 50% are going to love you so you

have to just

realize that you can’t please everybody. Everybody has

their different

agenda. Presently I am not practicing. My license in

America to practice

medicine is in California but I live in New York. The

worst thing that

can happen to a doctor is they take your license and

you lose your

practice; you lose your income, and actually that’s

why so few doctors will

say anything negative about the food industry or about

drugs because

they are deathly afraid of losing their licenses. When

you look at some

of the legal cases, drug companies will actually turn

in doctors who

don’t follow the normal pattern of prescribing drugs.

They computerize who

is prescribing what. That information, apparently, is

available to drug

companies and if they see doctor’s practicing patterns

of not

prescribing as many drugs as their peers, they will

actually report them to the

state licensing board and those doctors will then be

investigated for

not practicing the standard practice of medicine. So

there you have the

reason why doctors aren’t speaking out.

 

 

 

For me, you know, what can they do? I’m not in

practice now, so there

is no license to take away. And people such as myself

never really get

into the mainstream media, so we pose less of a threat

to drug

companies. We are kept out of the loop. We could never

get our message out on

national television, for example. However, there is a

chance with the

internet to get out some truthful information about

medicine and the drug

companies to begin to wake people up.

 

 

 

Pam: Helke Ferrie said something very interesting at a

conference she

gave in Toronto. She is a medical journalist and

actually finds a lot of

her information or “dirt” directly from the medical

establishment. She

says she doesn’t need to get complaints from consumers

who are angry

about the state of our medical system. She is getting

her information

from the pharmacists and the doctors who are fed up

with being pawns in

the system.

 

 

 

Greg: The whole medical system is built on a

foundation of lies. As

people become more and more educated about health, I’m

sure there will be

many more from their side that also turn on them. What

I find amazing

is that they’ve been able to pull off this charade for

so long.

 

 

 

 

 

It has only been a hundred years that drug medicine

has existed. For

eons people have been using herbs and natural

substances and there was a

huge health movement of eclectics and herbalists and

homeopaths before

the American Medical Association started to band

together and create

this monopoly. What we have is a monopoly in health

care. Then we had the

Flexner Report where this non-medical person decided

that the German

healthcare system was what America should follow. It

should all be

hospital-based and laboratory-based. That was the

start of so-called

scientific medicine which means if you just study one

thing at a time, you

can’t study the whole body at one time.

 

 

 

You can’t study diets and nutrients if you’re using

science, you can

only give a person one thing at a time and see what it

does. That’s not

how the body works. So the German system was

instituted. The Rockefeller

and Carnegie Foundations got together and funded only

a handful of

medical schools. They stopped all the women’s medical

schools. They kept

only two black medical schools. They cut out the

homeopathic schools. You

had the beginning of the monopoly, which was German

lab, hospital, and

drug-based. And now it’s very interesting that Germany

has got their

herbal German Commission E where they’ve gone in very

heavily towards

herbal medicine and they also have drug medicine.

We’re over here where we

completely sideline herbal medicine and even try to

pretend it is more

dangerous than drugs with all this talk about how we

should regulate

herbs and everything. It’s a big move for the monopoly

of drugs and

medicine to be continued under the conventional

medical establishment of

pharmaceuticals.

 

 

 

Greg: I love this line that you always hear when they

attack the

nutritional supplement industry in the media:

“Nutritional supplements aren’t

regulated.” First of all this isn’t true and secondly,

from what I see,

it’s the drugs that are unregulated. What kinds of

regulations are in

place when 25% of the people that take pharmaceutical

drugs are injured

by them or when hundreds of thousands of people a year

die from them?

That’s not regulation. Where is the FDA’s oversight?

 

 

 

The FDA admits that they don’t have the time to deal

with all of the

reports they get and, even so, relatively few doctors

ever report adverse

drug reactions.

 

 

 

Greg: Just about everybody takes some sort of a daily

vitamin or

nutritional supplement. What kind of side effects are

showing up? You’d be

lucky to count on your hands the number of people who

claim to have been

injured by a nutritional supplement every year.

 

 

 

Yes! There are from zero to one deaths annually from

nutrients and

herbs. And the ones that are targeted, such as

ephedra, are ones that are

terribly abused by people for weight loss or to get

some sort of herbal

high. They are used in such high amounts and usually

accompanied by

other drugs, alcohol, or starvation diets. They are

certainly not

prescribed according to normal recommendations of

herbalists. Manufacturers

have to take some of the blame as well because they

make false claims and

they make a product that has high amounts of a single

potent herb and

then people will take it in exorbitant amounts to get

more of an effect.

 

 

 

Greg: Yeah, that’s true.

 

 

 

Pam: I learned recently that supplement sales are

decreasing. I believe

that people are simply disillusioned by the effects

that they are

expecting from supplements so they give up buying

them. I’m hoping that this

means that people are either turning towards higher

quality supplements

and/or becoming more reliant upon nutrient-dense foods

to improve the

status of their health. Ultimately, my big message to

the consumer is it

still comes down to breakfast, lunch and dinner and

that is why I am

teaching Sally Fallon’s work and going out to the

farms and bringing back

real food to the people. In other words, let’s buy

from the farms

because then you know the exact quality and the

nutrient density of the

foods. If you are not getting results from

supplements, it is probably

because you are not getting optimal nutrients from

your breakfast, lunch,

and dinner. What I say is that food has become too

anonymous and we need

to go back to the farm and develop a relationship with

the farmer so

you know him and you can look him in the eye and see

if he is using

chemical sprays, see if he is addressing nutrient

density and so on. I

mean, drive 20 miles. Essentially we are

hunter-gatherers. Man has

traditionally gone a long time to look for their food

and I think we need to

go back to being hunter-gatherers and drive out to the

country 20-30

miles to go get real eggs, real meat, real chicken and

really adjust to

the quality of the food. That is how we, one person at

a time, can fix

this mess that we are in.

 

 

 

Yeah. All the solutions are there and they are simple

solutions.

 

 

 

Greg: That’s the irony of the whole situation. They

are simple

solutions. It’s not complicated and that’s what most

people think and that’s

what the medical industry has created, all this

confusion because through

confusion they can deceive you. That’s what we try to

educate people

about with our publication too.

 

 

 

Pam: All the information is both a blessing and a

curse.

 

 

 

Yes, and we have so much information that we have

totally turned off

the public. It’s like part of what you are saying

about the people not

taking as many supplements. What happened when the

supplement industry

began to make a lot of money? A lot of huge

manufacturers got into the

business. I think they were mostly pharmaceutical

companies and they

created synthetic supplements. As for access to

healthy food, I’ve been

working with CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture)

for many years. I

started on in my community three years ago. A group of

people buy a share

in an organic farm and every week the farmers pick

their crops and

deliver them to us. We come to someone’s garage and

pick them up. What could

be easier! These CSAs are all over North America and

they’re part of

the movement to get back to basics.

 

 

 

Greg: Even though I support the nutritional supplement

industry in

general, I see the tentacles of the pharmaceutical

industry creeping into

our industry big time now. In fact, most of the

vitamins that are made

are manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry. If we

can’t trust them

for the drugs, how can we trust the supplements they

make?

 

 

 

Pam: You’re right Greg. It doesn’t seem to me that

industry nor the

government are overly concerned with our wellness.

I’ve heard about a book

written by the Federal Reserve called “How to keep our

Money Healthy.”

The book suggests that in order to keep “our money”

healthy the

government must ensure that the population expires

before they retire. The

book continues to explain that in order to accomplish

this, it would be

critical to promote a high sugar diet.

 

 

 

Greg: Sugar and drugs go hand and hand, no doubt. We

started out this

interview discussing sugar. Over consumption of sugar

creates many of

the health problems we’re seeing and then you have all

these drugs which

people think are a solution to the problem and they

actually perpetuate

it so we are on a fast track right down the tubes.

 

 

 

Well that’s it. What Pam was saying is interesting

because the only way

the people I am working with (Friends of Freedom)

could figure that the

government could keep allowing the high death rate due

to drugs was

because it would really mess up the pension plans. If

we keep saying “a

healthy diet, nutrients, and exercise will make you

live longer,” that

scares the heck out of the pension funds because then

they have to put up

money for all these people who are living too long. It

is far better

for the economy if you die young.

 

 

 

As for the pharmaceutical industry taking over

supplements, that’s

definitely on their agenda. I’m going to Bonn, Germany

in November to the

Codex Alimentarius meetings. Everybody really needs to

get up to speed

on this activity. According to World Trade agreements,

all countries who

signed the agreements have to “harmonize” their food

and supplement

supplies. To the Codex committee that means all

supplements have to be in

a very low potency range to be available to the

public. Otherwise, all

supplements are going to be designated as drugs and

available only on

prescription. This feeds directly into the hands of

the drug companies,

who like you said Greg, are only too happy to take

over control of this

very profitable industry—making them cheaply out of

coal tar and

selling them at an enormous profit. Instead of paying

$10 for a supplement I

wouldn’t be surprised to see a $100 dollar price tag.

Several countries

have fallen already and we at Friends of Freedom are

fighting to save

Canada and the U.S. I must take the opportunity to

give kudus to

Trueman Tuck, the founder of Friends of Freedom.

Trueman is an inspiring and

tireless advocate of health freedom.

 

 

 

Pam: Do you believe we are living longer Carolyn

because I believe

those numbers are all skewed? I don’t think we are

living longer.

 

 

 

No. That keeps being said but when you look at the

statistics comparing

different countries, we aren’t. Yes, they are skewing

them. We also

have people who are just hobbling around in their last

couple of decades.

We have to look at the quality of life.

 

 

 

Pam: And they are ignoring all of that. I met a

91-year old man who had

been “medically abused” in a senior home. Prior to

being admitted into

this home he was a healthy, coherent man (and not on

any medications).

After two weeks, the staff at the home had him on

about 14 medications.

He became weak and incoherent. His family was

devastated when they saw

him and immediately pulled him out of a senior

facility.

 

 

 

Greg: Carolyn, you’ve done some research exposing the

connection to

nursing homes and the drug companies? Nursing homes

seem to be the easiest

place in the world for people to be over medicated. I

have never seen

anyone in a nursing home that wasn’t on at least five

different drugs

while many are on up to fifteen and twenty like Pam

just said. I have

taken care of some elderly people before and when they

reached the final

stage of life they were put into a nursing home and

their quality of

life went downhill quickly once they went in there

because they overloaded

them with drugs.

 

 

 

I’ll send you a cartoon that I use. I don’t even know

who did it. It

has pictures from an infant to an old man with

captions above their

heads. For the infant it is amoxicillin, for the kid

it’s Ritalin, for the

college kid it’s No-Doze and on and on. By the time

they get to the

seniors it says “everything else.” And yes, in the

report, Death By

Medicine, there is a section “Warehousing Our Elders.”

I wrote a number of

pages on various studies regarding the horrors in

nursing homes. That’s

all there. During my internship in medicine I spent a

month at a senior’s

care hospital. With not much to do at night I began to

study all the

charts and developed a system for correlating all the

medications that

each patient was on. I was shocked to find that people

were being

seriously overmedicated. Some patients were getting

three similar drugs to

treat one problem. A doctor would rush in, see a

patient, prescribe a

drug, but never bother to sift through the chart to

see what else they were

taking. It was pretty appalling.

 

 

 

Pam: In other civilizations around the world the

elderly are revered

and well respected. I’ve met two people who have a

senior facility and

their intention was to rehabilitate the elderly by

getting them on whole

foods and supplements. Their vision was to get these

senior citizens

well again so that they could become independent.

 

 

 

It’s like the school lunch program in Appleton,

Wisconsin where a

health food bakery called Natural Ovens supplies

healthier, whole foods for

the school and the kids are doing great. You know,

those sort of things

are the only way we can get some statistics to show

what can be done to

reverse the damage being done.

 

 

 

In Death By Medicine under Warehousing Our Elders, I

say the moral and

ethical fiber of society can be judged by the way it

treats its weakest

members. As Pam just said, some cultures honor and

respect the wisdom

of their elders, keeping them at home to continue

participation in the

community. However, American nursing homes where

millions of our elders

die represent the pinnacle of socialization and

medical abuse.

 

 

 

Greg: There’s no doubt in my mind that nursing homes

represent the

biggest cash cow for the pharmaceutical industry. In

fact, I am looking at

your report right now Carolyn. It says 5,283 of the

nation’s 17,000

nursing homes were cited for abuse violation in a

two-year period study

from January 1999 through 2001. That’s almost

one-third of the nursing

homes cited for abuse. That’s an astounding number.

I’m sure that

overmedication played a role in many of these abuses.

 

 

 

There’s a lawsuit I’m currently following by

psychiatrist, Dr. Stefan

Kruszewski, in Philadelphia. He was hired to root out

fraud, abuse, and

waste within the state’s Department of Public Welfare.

But what he

found out, his bosses didn’t want to hear. He reported

that the psychiatric

programs in Philadelphia alone have had people on 8

and 10 different

drugs for no apparent reason. As in most of these

cases you have to

follow the money. What are the kickbacks there? How

much money is the

government or certain individuals getting for

prescribing all of those drugs?

The good doctor was fired for his efforts but

fortunately he is suing

the state in federal court.

 

 

 

Greg: There’s another study in your report about

nursing homes that

says, “The average senior receives 25 prescriptions

annually and of the

6.3 million seniors, a total of 7.9 million medication

alerts were

triggered. Less than one-half that number, 3.4 million

were detected in

1999.” I’m not quoting this fully here, but obviously

it is a serious,

serious problem across the board and that’s why I

applaud what you’ve done

by writing your report. This is important information

that needs to get

out to the masses.

 

 

 

It is unfortunate because we have all been brain

washed to believe that

a pill will treat us so the issue of taking

responsibility for our

health doesn’t seem to cross people’s minds. If we get

sick, it’s off to

the doctor, who only has time to prescribe a drug.

It’s a really sweet

deal for drug companies and doctors but not for

patients.

 

 

 

Greg: In Death By Medicine you address medication

errors that are

occurring in hospitals throughout America. How serious

of a problem is this?

 

 

 

It’s very serious. Here are just a few examples that

people can read

about in my report. A survey of a 1992 national

pharmacy database found a

total of 429,827 medication errors from 1,081

hospitals. Medication

errors occurred in 5.22% of patients admitted to these

hospitals each

year. The authors concluded that a minimum of 90,895

patients annually were

harmed by medication errors in the country as a whole.

 

 

 

A 2002 study shows that 20% of hospital medications

for patients had

dosage mistakes. Nearly 40% of these errors were

considered potentially

harmful to the patient. In a typical 300-patient

hospital the number of

errors per day were 40.

 

 

 

Problems involving patients’ medications were even

higher the following

year, 2003. The error rate intercepted by pharmacists

in this study was

24%, making the potential minimum number of patients

harmed by

prescription drugs 417,908.

 

 

 

Greg: How do we know if any of the drugs on the market

are safe?

 

 

 

We really don’t know on an individual basis. This is

another aspect of

scientific medicine that the public takes for granted,

the testing of

new drugs. Unlike the class of people that take drugs

who are ill and

need medication, in general, drugs are tested on

individuals who are

fairly healthy and not on other medications that can

interfere with

findings. They are also mostly males. When the drugs

are declared “safe” and

enter the drug prescription books, they are naturally

going to be used

by people on a variety of other medications and who

also have a lot of

other health problems. Then, a new phase of drug

testing called

Post-Approval comes into play, which is the

documentation of side effects once

drugs hit the market. In one very telling report, the

General

Accounting Office (an agency of the U.S. Government)

“found that of the 198

drugs approved by the FDA between 1976 and 1985... 102

(or 51.5%) had

serious post-approval risks... the serious

post-approval risks (included)

heart

failure, myocardial infarction, anaphylaxis,

respiratory depression

and arrest, seizures, kidney and liver failure, severe

blood disorders,

birth defects and fetal toxicity, and blindness.”

 

 

 

The investigative show NBC’s “Dateline” wondered if

your doctor is

moonlighting as a drug rep. After a year-long

investigation they reported

that because doctors can legally prescribe any drug to

any patient for

any condition, drug companies heavily promote

“off-label” and frequently

inappropriate and non-tested uses of these medications

in spite of the

fact that these drugs are only approved for specific

indications they

have been tested for.

 

 

 

The leading causes of adverse drug reactions are

antibiotics (17%),

cardiovascular drugs (17%), chemotherapy (15%), and

analgesics and

anti-inflammatory agents (15%).

 

 

 

Greg: You also report that prescription drugs pollute

our water supply.

Is this really a serious problem?

 

 

 

We have reached the point of saturation with

prescription drugs. We

have arrived at the point where every body of water

that has ever been

tested around the world contains measurable drug

residues (synthetic

hormones, blood pressure medications, statin drugs).

We don’t need a

prescription anymore, just drink some water and you’ve

got your drugs for the

day! We are inundated with drugs. The tons of

antibiotics used in

animal farming, which run off into the water table and

surrounding bodies of

water, are conferring antibiotic resistance to germs

in sewage, and

these germs are also found in our water supply.

Flushed down our toilets

are tons of drugs and drug metabolites that also find

their way into our

water supply. We have no idea what the long-term

consequences of

ingesting a mixture of drugs and drug-breakdown

products will do to our

health. It’s another level of iatrogenic disease that

we are unable to

completely measure.

 

 

 

Greg: Is the FDA starting to crack down on the drug

companies or is

this just a facade?

 

 

 

Periodically, a drug manufacturer is fined by the FDA

when the abuses

are too glaring and impossible to cover up. The May

2002 Washington Post

reported that the maker of Claritin, Schering-Plough

Corp., was to pay

a $500 million dollar fine to the FDA for

quality-control problems at

four of its factories. The FDA tabulated infractions

that included 90%,

or 125 of the drugs they made since 1998. Besides the

fine, the company

had to stop manufacturing 73 drugs or suffer another

$175 million

dollar fine. PR (Public Relations) statements by the

company told another

story. The company assured consumers that they should

still feel

confident in its products.

 

 

 

To us it seems like a large settlement but it really

only amounts to a

slap on the wrist to a billion dollar industry. Still

it serves as a

warning to the drug industry about maintaining strict

manufacturing

practices. According to the Washington Post article, a

federal appeals court

ruled in 1999 that the FDA could seize the profits of

companies that

violate “good manufacturing practices.” Since that

time Abbott

Laboratories Inc. paid $100 million for failing to

meet quality standards in the

production of medical test kits, and Wyeth

Laboratories Inc. paid $30

million in 2000 to settle accusations of poor

manufacturing practices.

 

 

 

Unfortunately the crack down is never about the damage

that the drugs

are doing, but the cleanliness of the plant or the

labeling on the

packaging. This is not at all what we imagine the FDA

should be policing,

when we have hundreds of thousands of people dying

from prescription

drugs.

 

 

 

Actually, the indictment against Schering-Plough

wasn’t even initiated

by the FDA. It came after the Public Citizen Health

Research Group,

lead by Dr. Sidney Wolfe, called for a criminal

investigation of

Scherling-Plough, charging that the company

distributed albuterol asthma

inhalers even though it knew the units were missing

the active ingredient.

 

 

 

Greg: Carolyn, we could go on for hours with this

interview, I’m sure.

Before we finish why don’t you tell us more about what

you are working

on right now.

 

 

 

I write, consult, lecture, am a medical expert witness

in legal

challenges against supplement companies and

individuals, make herb

formulations, run the Body Rejuvenation Cleanse

program, and generally advocate

for health. I have written several books. I just

published a book for the

Everything series called “Everything Alzheimer’s” that

just came out

the other day and I’ve just finished a book called

“Hormonal Balance”

that will come out Spring 2005. I have written “The

Miracle of Magnesium,”

and “Natural Prescriptions for Common Ailments,”

“Menopause Naturally,”

and “Homeopathic Remedies for Children’s Common

Ailments.” I consult

for Friends of Freedom and curesnaturally.com as well

as

yeastconnection.com. I got involved with

detoxification quite heavily after they

started spraying New York with malathion and then

after September 11th when

everybody turned up toxic. It’s a pretty full life.

 

 

 

Greg: Do you have a web site that people can view?

 

 

 

Yes. It’s www.carolyndean.com. There is not much there

but that is my

current web site. The final thing I want to leave

people with is the

need to support the effort to stop Codex. Go to

www.friendsoffreedom.com

and sign up as a member so you can be kept up to date

on what’s really

happening with our health freedom. The only way I will

be able to afford

to go to the Codex meetings in Germany, November 1-5,

is through

generous donations by people who are concerned about

health freedom. We have

to stop those people who are intent on legislating and

legalizing

GREED. That’s the best sound bite I could come up with

to describe what’s

going on at Codex. Please use it freely!

 

 

 

Greg: Is there an email address if any of our readers

want to

correspond with you?

 

 

 

People can get to me through the web site. I am pretty

swamped. I don’t

know how much correspondence I could do with people.

But people can

join Friends of Freedom and definitely keep up on what

I am doing.

 

 

 

Greg: Well Carolyn, it has been an honor and a

privilege to speak with

you. I applaud all the hard work you’re doing. I’m

sure that we’ll work

together in the future on another project because your

information is

some of the best out there.

 

 

 

Thank you Greg. Keep up the excellent work you’re

doing with CRUSADOR.

I’ve learned that one person speaking the truth can

neutralize about

750,000 people who are telling lies!! That gives me

hope!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AIM Barleygreen

" Wisdom of the Past, Food of the Future "

 

http://www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Diets.html