Voices of reason continue to emerge in FDA guidance alert

[Guest guest]

http://www.naturalhealthline.com/New Controversies Challenge the

Health Freedom Movement

 

Health Freedom Rights and Universal Health Care

Make It to National Talk Radio

© By Peter Barry Chowka

 

 

There's something happening here

What it is ain't exactly clear

There's a man with a gun over there

Telling me I've got to beware.

 

-Steven Stills, "For What It's Worth," 1966

 

(May

1, 2007) In recent weeks, few Internet users have not been subjected to

one or more "sky is falling" e-mails, emanating from a variety of

"health freedom" groups. They all warn about alleged imminent threats

to Americans' continued access to nutritional supplements and other CAM

(complementary alternative medicine) modalities at the hands of the FDA

(Food and Drug Administration) and, more recently, the U.S. Congress in

the form of a Senate FDA reform bill, S. 1082. A number of blogs have now taken up the cause, this one at Daily Kos being an example.

The ball got rolling in this area on April 5, when something called the Natural Solutions Foundation

(NSF) began sending out hyperbolic mass e-mails on a sensational new

subject. The first one, ominously titled "Act Now: FDA Forbidding

AllAlternative HealthCare," began:

 

 

The US FDA is at it again. They have been notorious for decades for

their biased attacks and uneven handling of natural,

non-drug/surgery/radiation based health options. This time, though,

they are playing for keeps.

 

The goal is simple: through a "Guidance" about the regulation of "CAM"

(which they conveniently define as "Complementary and Alternative

MEDICINE" the FDA hopes to serve the interests of Big Pharma by eliminating all CAM practices and products. ALL of them.

[errors and emphasis in original]

 

 

 

 

 

Rima Laibow, M.D. (2005)

Photo © By Peter Chowka

 

 

The e-mail, written by the NSF's medical director, Rima E. Laibow,

M.D., went on to claim that the FDA was supposedly going to see to it

that "all substances, including vitamins, minerals, herbs, co-factors,

etc., automatically become untested drugs." And that "Such use can only

legally take place with FDA approved drugs." [sic] The government

document at the root of the fuss was the "FDA Guidance for

Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products" announced by the FDA

on February 27, 2007 (PDF version here).

The

NSF alert contained an urgent request for readers to send comments to

the FDA, by clicking on a convenient link in the NSF e-mail that opened

a new page sponsored and paid for by the NSF at Democracy in Action

("wiring the progressive movement"). The new page requested the

responder's personal information and said that, after providing this

personal data, a message reflecting the NSF's position would be sent in

the responder's name to the FDA. (Meanwhile, the FDA maintains its own comment page

on the CAM Guidance issue, the direct URL of which could easily have

been provided by the NSF without the information-harvesting Democracy

in Action middlemen.)

Despite

the systematically ambiguous, vague, and largely unsubstantiated nature

of the first NSF FDA CAM Guidance "alert," and many other urgent alerts

that would soon follow, the instantaneous and cost free forwarding of

these e-mails that the massive online interconnectivity of everyone on

the World Wide Web now makes so effortless allowed the NSF campaign to

take off right from the start.

Throughout

the month of April, similar e-mail blasts were issued by the NSF, with

increasingly dire warnings, and hundreds of thousand – perhaps even

millions – of copies were quickly forwarded to multiple new recipients

around the world. The original NSF e-mails all contained links to the

personal information mining/send-your-comments-to-the-FDA page and also

solicited funds for the NSF, which was described as "a non-profit corporation devoted to protecting and promoting health freedom for all Americans."

Soon, other "health freedom" individuals, groups, and Web sites joined the campaign, including Newstarget.com,

a high traffic Web site that features self-described "health ranger"

Mike Adams' prolific writings on natural health-related topics. On

April 13, Adams published an article,

"New FDA guidelines threaten religious freedoms; Holy water could be

regulated as 'drugs' and rosaries as 'medical devices.'" Another article

at Adams' site, dated April 11, 2007, claimed that unnamed "Well-funded

criminals attack NewsTarget, health freedom groups [including Laibow's

NSF site] with covert disruption campaigns."

Before long, more established groups (including the American Association for Health Freedom, Citizens for Health,

and others) were taking positions, many of them a bit more nuanced than

the NSF's and Adams' – not exactly agreeing with the crisis tone of the

NSF or Adams about the FDA but apparently not wanting to miss out on

the action and growing public interest in the subject, either.

Major media coverage followed, including a sensational April 24 article in World Net Daily, "Feds eye control of vitamins, supplements – even water!"

Commenting approvingly on April 28 at the NSF blog

about what the NSF and its supporters had achieved, attorney Ralph

Fucetola, JD (the self-described "vitamin lawyer"), wrote, "The

grassroots of the Health Freedom Movement caught fire when the people

learned that FDA's bureaucrats, under the guise of 'just restating the

law' were actually setting the basis for handing over our supplements

and alternatives to the Big Pharma Cartel."

Caveat Lector

Around

the third week of April, some thoughtful, cautionary, and more

dispassionate analysis began to emerge. Longtime CAM/integrative

medicine proponent John Weeks began publishing a series of articles on

the FDA CAM Guidance at his Integrator Blog (Part 1 on April 20, Part 2 on April 23).

In

Part 1, Weeks interviewed Philip Chao, senior scientific advisor for

the FDA and a co-author of the FDA's CAM Guidance document. In Part 2,

Weeks himself concluded his extensive reporting with this comment: "The

FDA's 'agenda' is not the only agenda challenged here. My own sense was

that the Natural Solutions Foundation's Libertarian agenda, and calling

attention to itself, may be more important to it than providing clarity

of thought and action on the Guidance document. If the FDA

was found to show as selective a memory of facts as Natural Solutions

Foundations leadership shows in its emails, this organization would be

sending Paul Revere on another ride through the internet's ethers. Yes,

caveat lector."

Before the end of April, the National Health Federation

(NHF) also started to weigh in. The not-for-profit NHF is the oldest

(founded in 1955) national, and now international, natural

healing/health freedom organization. The NHF is a public membership

organization and, perhaps most notably, unlike many of the other

stakeholders in this debate, it does not sell advertising or products

from its Web site.

On April 27, the NHF published a press release,

"Much Ado About Nothing – Let's Get the FDA/CAM Issue Put to Rest." The

author, the NHF's Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist Lee Bechtel, writes

"The [FDA] Guidance as drafted does not prevent access to CAM

providers. It does not prevent the use of supplements/herbs etc. by

medical professionals in their practice, with limitation, nor does or

would it directly impact consumers/patients. It would not prevent the

use of healthy foods in a diet recommended by a doctor.

 

"What the Guidance does do is present current FDA thinking on how CAM fits within the current context of FDA food and drug regulation." [original emphasis]

Behind

the scenes, as the April 30 deadline for comments on the FDA CAM

Guidance document was extended into late May by the FDA, debate about

what the FDA is doing vis-à-vis CAM and how people should

respond raged, threatening to splinter even further the fragile health

freedom movement (if it can even be called a "movement") on both sides

of the Atlantic. (Many Western European health freedom advocates have

been following the FDA CAM Guidance issue closely, too.)

On April 27, Joseph Mercola, D.O., who runs the popular Web site mercola.com, posted a response

to the FDA CAM Guidance document titled "New FDA Initiative Circulating

the Net Does NOT Warrant Alarm or Action." Mercola writes that he

"invested in a legal consultation and paid one of the top Washington DC

lawyers that defends against FDA actions $500 an hour to review the

initiative and provide his impression of the proposal. After reviewing

his analysis and consulting with two other attorneys, my take is that

this proposal does not warrant a response." Mercola's article also

links to the NHF's press release (cited above), suggesting his apparent

agreement with the NHF's analysis.

As

of this writing, mercola.com readers have posted 118 responses, about

one half of them disagreeing with Mercola that the FDA CAM Guidance

document does not warrant immediate action.

Universal Health Care Challenged Coast to Coast

In

reading all 118 comments posted at mercola.com, as well as what all of

the proponents of a vigorous response to the FDA like the NSF have

written, I was struck that none of them mentioned the threats

posed to medical freedom, and alternative medicine and CAM in

particular, by the prospect of universal health care/socialized

medicine that is looming ever larger on the national political horizon.

This is a topic that I have been writing about increasingly during the

past several years.

One

can't watch any cable television news channels or read the mainstream

press these days without coming across front page and lead story

reporting on the subject of socialized medicine and its supposed

imminence. For example, on April 26, in the first debate among the

Democrat candidates for President in 2008, which took place in South

Carolina, virtually all of them reiterated their support for universal,

government mandated, conventional medical care. Two days earlier, Sen.

Edward Kennedy (D-MA) introduced legislation

in the U.S. Congress to expand Medicare (government socialized

medicine) – "Medicare for All" – to all Americans. On the same day,

speaking in New Hampshire, and three days later in North Carolina,

former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican Presidential

candidate, "accused his Democratic rivals of embracing health care

plans that would amount to socialized medicine."

Socialized

medicine, in this writer's opinion, is the equivalent of the 3,000 lb.

elephant in the room that everyone in the "CAM" and alternative

medicine fields – most of them concerned to excess about the potential

actions of the FDA – is overlooking. It's as if almost everyone is

focused exclusively on a summer thundershower while a category 4

hurricane is about to make landfall.

 

 

 

 

 

Robin Falkov, L.A.P., D.N.B.H.C.

 

 

Fortunately,

some players appear to be paying increasing attention. One of them,

Robin Falkov, a Licensed Acupuncture Physician and Diplomate National

Board of Homeopathic Examiners, assembled a panel of experts that

appeared live on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory (C2C),

the most popular program on late night radio in North America,

broadcast live on over 500 radio stations coast to coast (including 50

kw clear channel AM radio powerhouses like WABC in New York City and

KFI in Los Angeles). The topic of the three hour discussion on the April 24-25 C2C show was "health freedom rights."

I was one

of three people invited by Falkov and Noory to be on the program. For

one half hour, starting at 12:30 am PDT, I was interviewed by Noory,

with input by Falkov, on the topic of health freedom, alternative

medicine, and universal health care. My main point was that the

political push for "universal health care" is the most serious threat

to Americans' freedom, autonomy, and choices in healing since the time

of the Founding Fathers.

At her Web site,

Falkov, well versed on the subject of Codex and other medical-political

issues, suggested "We have to wake up and demand that our Candidates

and Representatives do NOT vote for Universal Healthcare." [original

emphasis]

 

 

 

 

 

Rollye James (1995)

Photo © By Peter Chowka

 

 

The evening following the late night C2C health freedom panel broadcast, another veteran talk show host, Rollye James,

invited me on her nationally-syndicated live broadcast which is also

carried on XM satellite radio. I have worked with James on the air many

times before, going back to 1991, and the 90 minute long appearance

with her on April 25 was another memorable media encounter.

James

is extremely knowledgeable about alternative therapies and – virtually

without peer in the mainstream national media – she knows a lot about

the politics of health care. She is also a vigorous and articulate

proponent of medical freedom of choice.

Our

discussion touched on many issues including the seduction and

co-optation of alternative medicine by conventional medicine or

"Medicine, Inc.," the transmogrification of alt med into the

questionable and largely unproven CAM hybrid, and the absolute dangers

of mandatory socialized medicine – including a data consolidation/hyper

monitoring/privacy busting/government control matrix that is a

nightmare scenario right out of George Orwell's prophetic novel 1984.

Since

events, as of this writing (May 1, 2007), on all of the fronts touched

on in this article, are still developing, there will be further

original and exclusive reporting here in the days and weeks to come.

Please stay tuned.