Fwd: The Myth That Makes You Sick

[Guest guest]

Health & Healing

Neil Jensen

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 12:47:28 -0700

The Myth That Makes You Sick

 

From

 

The Myth that Makes You Sick

Copyright© 2002 by Teresa Tsalaky

 

Let's say you've decided you're willing to take responsibility for your

health. Now it's time to take action, right? Well, not quite. First,

there's an illusion that you must thoroughly dismantle if you want to

eliminate the biggest roadblock on the path back to health. This

illusion is deeply ingrained. It's so deeply ingrained in the American

psyche, that it sounds crazy to argue that it's a lie, a myth.

 

The myth says that the doctor's medicine is the best medicine. It's not

true. Modern American medicine is not as marvelous as most people

imagine.

 

Just ask some of the MDs who, appalled at the harm caused by their

profession, have dedicated part of their lives to trying to change it —

doctors like Stuart Berger, author of " What Your Doctor Didn't Learn in

Medical School. "

 

Or ask Mary Ruwart, candidate for FDA commissioner in 2002. Ruwart will

tell you that many allopathic medical procedures do not undergo

rigorous testing to prove their worth before their introduction. Years

later, when studies are done, the procedures don't always work as

expected, she says. She should know. She left her position as an

assistant professor of surgery at St. Louis University Medical School

in 1976 and spent the next twenty years in medical research, developing

drugs for The Upjohn Co. In her book, " Healing Our World: The Other

Piece of the Puzzle, " she explains how alternative therapies have been

excluded from our system of medicine.

 

If you need more than professional opinion, look at the official

statistics. For example, a 1978 report by the government's Office of

Technology Assessment says that less than twenty-five percent of all

drugs and medical procedures prescribed by MDs have been demonstrated

in controlled clinical trials to be useful. That means that if you go

to a doctor, more than three-quarters of the procedures in his arsenal

have not been proven to work. That's not opinion. It's fact. It's not

myth. It's truth.

 

Yet we have the illusion that the doctor only uses treatments that have

been tested and proven in very scientific, objective, double-blind

studies. We believe this because many doctors criticize their

competitors' therapies as unproven. Goldenseal root to fight an

infection? Unproven. Kinesiology to diagnose? Quackery! So say the

doctors when they're quoted in the public press. But they fail to hold

their own methods to the same standard. Allopathic treatment after

treatment fails to be proven effective in double-blind studies, yet

your doctor still uses them to treat you.

 

Meanwhile, competitors' treatments that have been proven through

rigorously controlled, double-blind, independently researched

experiments are automatically dismissed as bunk. MDs are trained to

assume no scientific proof is available for medicines and procedures

that are not endorsed by the American Medical Association. They

automatically tell you there's no proof regardless of whether they've

researched it.

 

Consider chelation therapy — an alternative a method of treating heart

disease by draining toxins and metabolic wastes from the body while

increasing blood flow. Most MDs don't offer it for fear of losing their

licenses. They will therefore tell you that chelation therapy has not

been proven effective. Yet it has.

 

When researchers L. Terry Chappell, MD, and John P. Stahl, PhD,

reviewed nineteen objective studies evaluating the effectiveness of

so-called EDTA chelation therapy, they discovered it works very well.

The studies were done on a total of nearly 23,000 patients. The

researchers discovered that eighty-seven percent had registered

clinical improvement. In one study, fifty-eight of sixty-five bypass

surgery candidates and twenty-four of twenty-seven people scheduled for

limb amputation were able to cancel their surgeries. Their findings are

reported in the book, " Questions from the Heart. "

 

If the efficacy of this treatment — which is much safer and much less

expensive than bypass surgery — has been proven in more than a dozen

scientific studies, why won't your doctor use it?

 

The next few chapters will answer that question, and in doing so, they

will chip away at the strong illusion that the doctor's medicine is

best.

 

A MERE HICCUP ON THE CONTINUUM

 

Medicine has been practiced in one form or another throughout human

history. That means hundreds of cultures around the globe — from the

smallest tribe in Guatemala to the greatest civilizations — have

created healing practices over tens of thousands of years. Modern

allopathic medicine's 200-year history is a mere hiccup on the

continuum. It represents a miniscule fraction of humankind's

accumulated medical knowledge.

 

If you're sick and can't get well, or if you have a disease that could

kill you, why would you eliminate more than ninety-nine percent of the

world's medical arsenal from your treatment protocol?

 

According to the World Health Organization, between sixty-five and

eighty percent of all people on Earth rely on non-allopathic medicine

for their primary health care.

 

WHO has not fallen prey to the myth that the allopathic doctor's

medicine is best. It has broken through the illusion, because it knows

the facts. For example, in 1993, it ranked the United States eighteenth

among industrialized nations for its level of good health. It said

healthier nations allow alternative modalities to openly compete in the

medical marketplace. In contrast, the United States has a medical

monopoly enforced by state laws and federal agencies.

 

WHO believes allopathic medicine is not best. It has chosen traditional

Chinese medicine as the system that should be propagated worldwide to

meet the health-care needs of our time.

 

China's traditional medicine shares three concepts with medical systems

around the world that have endured for millennia. They all are based on

the premises that:

 

 

1. A state of balance is necessary to maintain health.

 

2. Nature has a tendency to heal itself.

 

3. Mind and body are interdependent.

 

In most other civilizations in all other eras, medical men worked to

enhance what occurs in nature. If wounds naturally heal, what would

help them heal faster? If natural immunity overcomes bacteria and

viruses, how can this natural ability be enhanced?

 

Even the so-called father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, recognized

that all living organisms have inherent healing forces. He called them

" nature's healing power " and said the physician's job was to create

favorable conditions for these natural forces to do their healing work.

 

Hippocratic medical philosophy shares much in common with most of the

healing systems practiced throughout history in all parts of the world.

 

" Through the ages, healing has been practiced by folk healers who are

guided by traditional wisdom that sees illness as a disorder of the

whole person, involving not only the patient's body but his mind; his

self-image, his dependence on the physical and social environment as

well as his relation to the cosmos and the deities. These healers, who

still treat a majority of patients throughout the world, follow many

different approaches, which are holistic to different degrees, and they

use a wide variety of therapeutic techniques. What they have in common

is that they never restrict themselves to purely physical phenomena, as

the (allopathic) model does, " says physicist Fritjof Capra in " The

Turning Point. "

 

These other healing systems, with their herbal concoctions and low

technology, are just as effective as allopathic medicine and more

widespread. They are not chicanery, as American doctors would have you

believe.

 

Practitioners of other systems of medicine not only have many more

centuries of experience to rely upon, they also share the

qualifications of allopathic doctors: They are part of a professional

elite practicing medicine based on a written tradition.

 

The practitioners of these systems of medicine might be amused if they

heard an allopathic MD criticize their work as unscientific. They might

wonder at his hubris. What kind of distorted and illusory thinking

would make a person discount thousands of years of empirical knowledge?

It's allopathic medicine in the Western world that has limited

experience and only a tiny accumulation of knowledge.

 

Allopathic medicine is so young and so inexperienced that it hasn't had

time to be truly tested and proven. Without the accumulated knowledge

of centuries, its patients are little more than test subjects — human

guinea pigs whose lives will show whether allopathy, in the long run,

proves effective.

 

Does two hundred years of severely limited medical research in America

have more credence than tens of thousands of years of direct experience

elsewhere?

 

Our medical system, by saying yes, has limited the number of options

available to heal you to a tiny fraction of what has healed others. The

vast majority of available cures — including those that are the most

widely used worldwide — are not offered by physicians in the United

States, because they are labeled alternative.

 

" We can't say that alternative therapy is really alternative. After

all, the so-called alternative therapy has been around since the

beginning of man. It's medicine and drug companies which are relatively

new so are in effect the alternatives, " writes Sir Jason Winters.

 

After Winters got " incurable " cancer, he began searching for answers

and turned first to the Bible and other religious texts. " It doesn't

mention anything about cutting, chemotherapy and radiation in the

Bible. Buddha never spoke of it; neither did Jesus. Maybe they thought

it wasn't worth speaking about, " he wrote in his book, " In Search of

the Perfect Cleanse. "

 

Winters traveled the world looking for cancer cures. In his travels, he

discovered remedies that are nearly universal because they've been

proven to work — not by a double-blind experiment financed by a drug

company, but by millions of people who have used them over the

centuries.

 

For example, he found that more than thirty countries have the same

remedy for congested kidneys: Squeeze a lemon into a glass of warm

water each day and drink it.

 

Like many self-healers, the knowledge Winters gained by doing his own

research made him question why the allopathic medical establishment

keeps Westerners away from so many cures proven effective through

anecdotal evidence.

 

" The North American Indians did not spend billions of dollars each year

on research to know that chaparral is a great blood purifier. It

certainly is and they use it daily, " he wrote. " The Russian lumberjacks

did not spend millions on research and pay scientists high salaries to

tell them that if they rubbed DMSO on their swollen hands, the pain and

the arthritis would go. They still use it every day. They gypsies of

Europe did not spend billions to find out red clover is a great

medicine and blood purifier. By consuming it, they recover from

illnesses, including asthma and lung problems, and feel great. "

 

Self-healer Martha Christy came to the same conclusion after suffering

for years, then finding a natural cure that her doctors never told her

about. She then wrote a book about it titled, " Your Own Perfect

Medicine. "

 

" At this point in time, we need to stop examining and picking apart

therapies that have hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years of

practical experience behind them, " she wrote. " Rather than wasting

their time and our money on the unnecessary contortions of trying to

'scientifically' prove what hundreds of thousands of patients have

already experienced over many centuries with these simple and safe

natural techniques, the National Institutes of Health and their panel

of experts' efforts would be infinitely better spent on deciding how to

formulate new and inexpensive FDA guidelines for approving traditional

medical therapies and in qualifying responsible health care

practitioners for both conventional and natural medication. "

 

Until that happens, the doctor's medicine will not be the best

medicine. In fact, it might be the worst.

 

(Excerpted from " To Life: A Guide to Finding Your Path Back to Health, "

available on her Website. Email the author.)

 

[ Health ][ Sumeria ]

 

 

 

§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§*§

 

§ - PULSE ON WORLD HEALTH CONSPIRACIES! §

 

Subscribe:......... -

 

 

Gettingwell- / Vitamins, Herbs, Aminos, etc.

 

To , e-mail to: Gettingwell-

Or, go to our group site: Gettingwell

 

 

 

 

Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop!