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.†Like your sugar analogy, Pam, you can

only get them to do one thing. The only thing these women thought they could

“manage†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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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