A Bibliographic History of the Health Freedom Movement

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A Bibliographic History of the Health Freedom Movement by

Martin Walker

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 14:45:25 +0100

 

 

 

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A Bibliographic History of the Health Freedom Movement

 

by Martin J Walker

 

 

 

 

Growing rapidly over the last twenty five years, the Health Freedom

Movement (HFM) is essentially a movement struggling to give

individuals freedom of choice in treatments and practitioners the

right to practise other than allopathic therapies. At the moment both

these areas are constrained by monopoly interests which deny choice by

using the criteria of professionalism and profit for dispensing

health care. Dominating this system and its denial of choice are the

pharmaceutical companies, some of which have incomes as big as small

nation states and all of which compete ruthlessly for control of the

citizen's body.

 

 

 

Observing the HFM over the first years of the new century, it would be

easy to think that the movement is only about the defence of vitamins

and food supplements. On rare occasions, it might even look like the

HFM is actually only defending the commercial production and

distribution of vitamins and food supplements. This is principally

because the war which is being waged against vitamin and food

supplement producers by the pharmaceutical companies has recently

taken centre stage with the growing regulatory closeness of Codex

Alimentarius, the international consultation to regulate food

labelling, vitamins and food supplements. Codex most clearly affects

companies which produce medicines, food and food supplements.

However, beneath and beyond these companies are unattached individuals

and groups with an interest in health and the more personal use of

nutritional medicine and supplementation.

 

 

 

Those not covered by commercial interests but only by interests in

health, have had a double battle over the years because despite many

campaigns, they have had to eke out representation. The

pharmaceutical companies and the associations of established

professional medicine have made great headway, through various

mechanisms, in dividing and setting against each other aspects of the

HFM. Some groups of alternative therapists have for instance gained

professional recognition and these groups have in the main deserted

the battlefield. But while the pharmaceutical companies and the

medical profession have cleverly let into the mountain castle, or at

least the gatehouse, many fringe treatments such as reflexology and

aromatherapy, they are still determined to turn the major natural

alternatives into road kill on the way up the mountain.

 

 

 

If we were to summarise the complete picture of the medical monopoly,

it might involve; first an attempt by professional allopathic

medicine to maintain monopoly control of the diagnosis and treatment

of illness. Second an attempt by the pharmaceutical companies to keep

monopoly and regulatory control of allopathic medicines and high tech

therapies. Third an attempt by chemical and pharmaceutical interests

to deny environmental and chemically induced illness and finally an

attempt to severe the link between food, vitamins and other

supplements and the treatment or prevention of illness. Most

everything which has happened over the last two decades has flowed

from these four strategic imperatives.

 

 

 

In an attempt to describe the origins and the various departments of

the HFM, I have written the following bibliographic history of the

movement. This type of overview is important for the strength of the

future movement but also for the development of a theoretical

framework for the movement, something which so far has not been

approached with much gusto.

 

 

 

 

 

A History As Long As Organised Medicine

 

 

 

In Britain in 1900, Robert Bell M.D., published his book The Deputy

Physician, written to help people treat themselves. He opened the

book with a scathing attack on the profession of doctors. Having been

a doctor himself for thirty years, Bell felt able to write that the

ranks of the profession were made up 'of a set of ignorant,

avaricious, narrow minded, and selfish men, whose first care is to

their own interests'. He then went on to quote with relish the French

satirist who said, 'there are only two classes of physician - namely,

those who kill their patients and those who allow them to die'.

 

 

 

The attacks upon doctors began in earnest in the 'modern' period

during the middle of the 19th century when doctors in Europe and North

America organised their professional associations. Open warfare

continued apparently, in Britain at least, until the modern scientific

world came into being following the first world war.

 

 

 

From the 1920s onwards, and coincidentally the beginnings of radium

treatment for cancer, science and pharmaceutical medicine gained the

upper hand and became the centre of a much lauded belief system, in

which the doctor and the social concept of medicine were rarely

questioned publicly. Battles still went on but now they were more

covert and the casualties of this period are only now being written

about because information about them was previously so thoroughly

suppressed.

 

 

 

Then in the 1970s and 1980s, following a growing critical

consciousness, the opening up of society that began in the late

Sixties and the decline in State control of all aspects of government,

a movement critical of allopathic medicine and in favour of

alternatives began to coalesce in earnest. We might characterise the

battle for health freedom which seemed to begin anew at this time and

has continued to the present day, as being a period when the

pharmaceutical and chemical companies in particular have tried to

stamp their hegemony on the world of food and medicine. This is a time

when lab technicians and Chief Executive Officers of multinational

corporations have increasingly come to determine our health care.

 

 

 

Almost by accident, I was the author in 1993 of one of the most

substantial health freedom books of the contemporary period. It was

not until a year after Dirty Medicine was first published, however,

that I stumbled across Morris Bealle. Bealle was an American

journalist who first wrote on softball and baseball but later in his

life wrote books about the health monopoly of socialised medicine. He

also launched a magazine called Capsule News, which reported on the

pharmaceutical industry.

 

 

 

Bealle published his own books from Washington D.C. under the imprint

of All America House and he advertised Capsule News with the slogan

'The All American News Digest for All American people'. The book

which I have of his, House of Rockefeller, describes in Bealle's words

'how a shoestring was run into 200 billion dollars in two

generations'. There are chapters on all the main monopoly cartels or

Trusts of the Rockefeller empire, including the Drug Trust and the

Food Trust. Forty pages of original research into corporate monopoly.

 

 

 

The principal reason that Rockefeller enterprises were to become so

important to the development of first the medical monopoly and then

the HFM was that Rockefeller, his allied entrepreneurs and scientists

linked up their 70% ownership of all US pharmaceutical production with

interests in medical research, medical education, processed food and

media. It was this cultural nexus recognised by Bealle which played

an important part in ensuring, to paraphrase Henry Ford, that the

people could have any kind of medicine they wanted, as long as it was

chemical and allopathic.

 

 

 

Books published in England, during the 1950s, such as The Citizens

versus the Doctors, and the work, for example, of The Food Education

Society, which battled orthodoxy on nutrition, give a clear indication

that following the Second World War there was opposition to the

monopolistic role of the medical profession. This opposition was less

marked than in North America where both the philosophy of

individualism and opposition to the State expending private personally

earned money on 'what is best for the citizen' were deeply embedded.

 

 

 

Apart from and much better known than Bealle, were a number of books

and writers covering the period from the end of World War II until

the mid-1980s. These books, however subliminally, laid the

foundations for and influenced the emergence of the contemporary HFM.

 

 

 

 

 

The Literary Foundations of Health Feedom

 

 

 

Despite what quackbusters are always parroting, the health freedom

movement is not anti-scientific and definitely not anti-intellectual

or irrational. Its foundations we might claim, are among those who

question the uses of science, criticise its linkage with industry and,

in the field of health care, rage against the bastard motivation it

finds in profit. Supporters of the movement for health against

allopathic medicine, are amongst the greatest humanist writers of the

twentieth century.

 

 

 

Ivan Ilich, was born in 1926 and after studying philosophy, religion

and then history in Italy and Germany, went to live in North America

in 1951. He became a Pastor in an Irish Puerto Rican parish of New

York City, before eventually moving to Mexico. Although in the

Sixties Illich was to be involved in a number of Universities and well

regarded intellectual projects and despite writing for numerous well

known journals and newspapers, as well as writing the founding book of

Health Freedom, Medical Nemesis, his voice has always remained that

of an intellectual on the fringe.

 

 

 

Always treated with respect because of his immense and charismatic

intellectual imagination and scholarship, his ideas were so utterly at

variance with capitalist consumer society that his stature remains

ghost like. Illich is to social criticism what Kafka was to European

literature, a strange figure of unquestionable integrity and infinite

gravitas lobbing pointed criticism into bourgeoise society from the

Steppes.

 

 

 

Illich might be considered the founder of any movement against

iatrogenic illness and he did more to publicise the term than any

other writer. The first sentence of his introduction to Medical

Nemesis; The Expropriation of Health, reads: 'The medical

establishment has become a major threat to health'. Although his work

is in parts highly intellectual, like many great thinkers it is also

full of pithy truths which lead you to the very heart of the matter.

Published in 1975, in the aftermath of the revolts in the late

Sixties, Medical Nemesis was the first work to draw attention to the

changing role of the doctor and his descent from empirically minded

healer to pimp for the pharmaceutical companies.

 

 

 

In Medical Nemesis, Ilich outlines the fundamental personal and social

arguments for knowing your own body and treating yourself rather than

sacrificing yourself to the religion of medicine. His later work on

the incapacitating nature of the medical and other professions could

still direct our sense of strategy today twenty five years after it

was written.

 

 

 

In describing the struggle in North America between alternative

medicine and the emerging medical profession from the middle of the

nineteenth century, nothing can compare with the third volume of

Harris L. Coulter's life-time work, Divided Legacy (Science and Ethics

in American Medicine 1800-1914 - the battle between homeopaths and the

AMA). Coulter's history of the schisms in medical thought which he

began in 1973, was finished in 1995, with the fourth volume, an

account of Medicine in the Bacteriological Era 1800 to 1911.

 

 

 

Volume III of Divided Legacy gives a definitive account of attempts by

the AMA to force homeopaths out of the medical profession and

criminalise their practice. This is perhaps the ultimate quackbusting

text which spares no detail in describing how the AMA organised their

classic turf war. Divided Legacy and Coulter's other books such as

Shot in the Dark, his classic work on vaccination written with Barbara

Loe Fisher, show an erudition and scholarship rarely found in this day

and age.

 

 

 

Hans Reusch is another towering figure, whose three major books lay

bare the rotten heart of allopathic medicine. Reusch was a very

successful author whose best book had been made into a Hollywood film,

before he declared in the late Seventies that he would never write any

form of literature until vivisection had been stopped. His three

great anti-vivisection books heralded the modern uncompromising

anti-vivisection movement. Slaughter of the Innocent, The Naked

Empress and 1000 Doctors (and more) Against Vivisection, all draw

attention to the damage which vivisection and the animal testing of

drugs ultimately do to humans. In his examination of the Rockefeller

control of both the drug companies and medical research, Reusch was

one of the first to draw on Bealle's writing.

 

 

 

Another writer who looked closely at the Rockefeller empire and IG

Farben, while chronicling the suppression of a cancer cure was Edward

G. Griffin in his extensive book, World without Cancer - the story of

Vitamin B17. B17, also called Laetrile was developed by Dr. Ernst T.

Krebs, Jr. in the 1950s and was one of the first compounds to fall

serious victim to the quackbusters in the early Seventies. Griffin

charts in detail the scare stories about laetrile-related deaths and

the attempted criminalisation of practitioners.

 

 

 

In 2000, Kenny Ausubel, wrote the book which is presently the major

work on the suppression of a single cancer cure in America. Ausubel's

book, When Healing becomes a Crime, although focussing on Harry Hoxsey

who formulated a herbal cure for cancer, covers in interesting detail

the role of the AMA, the FDA and the US medical establishment in

suppressing the cure. Ausubel, an award-winning investigative

journalist and film maker wrote the book at the same time as making a

television documentary about Hoxsey. Despite the fact that there was

little in the way of historical precedent for his book, Ausubel covers

in a novel literary style the most important period of post war

suppression of medical choice in considerable detail.

 

 

 

Anyone who wants academic reflections on the power struggle between

scientific medicine and alternative therapies, might look at the

series of papers and articles which Howard S. Berliner wrote following

his PhD thesis, between 1977 and 1988. Berliner writes at length

about the funding of scientific medicine and the Rockefeller

Foundation. He writes in an easily accessible manner and his insights

into the connections between knowledge, science and finance are

important ingredients in understanding the monopoly power of the drugs

industry.

 

 

 

Thalidomide very pointedly and cruelly drew attention to both the

unregulated power of the drug companies and the non-science of

scientific medicine. In the mid-Sixties, the Kefauver hearings were

held in America. Begun by Senator Estes Kefauver, the hearings were

intended to expose and then break the monopoly power of the drug

companies. In 1966, Kefauver published his own book entitled in the

English edition, In a Few Hands: Monopoly Power in America. A few

years later this was followed by perhaps the best book on Thalidomide,

Thalidomide and the Power of the Drug Companies by Henning and Robert

Nilsson Sjostrom. Despite the fact that the book focuses in detail on

thalidomide, it gives one of the best general views of the corrupt

philosophy and bankrupt practices of the large pharmaceutical

companies. The authors describe how, even in the face of mounting

evidence, the companies responsible for thalidomide kept dodging the

recall of the drug.

 

 

 

In the 1960s and 70s there was already a growing sense of resistance

against the FDA and the drug companies, following frequent regulatory

attacks on alternatives. In 1970, Omar Garrison wrote his trail

blazing book, The Dictocrats attack on Health Foods and Vitamins. If

any one book could be called the founding book of resistance to Codex

it is this one. The head-on approach against the regulatory agencies

was echoed twenty six years later in Elaine Feuer's brilliant and

academically useful book, Innocent Casualties: The FDA's war against

humanity. Like Garrison, Feuer shows how the FDA turns the idea of a

'health protection agency' on it head, working only in favour of

vested interests.

 

 

 

At almost the same time as Garrison published his book, Morton Mintz's

book, The Therapeutic Nightmare[1], later published as By Prescription

Only was published in America. It was perhaps one of the first books

to give an account of the iatrogenic outcome of many modern medicines.

 

 

 

Although popular books about alternatives and health became really

prominent in the late Eighties and Nineties, one British writer, a

highly regarded Irish journalist, Brian Inglis, began writing popular

historical accounts of alternative medicine in the late seventies.

Throughout the Eighties, Inglis published three books, The Alternative

Health Guide, The Case for Unorthodox Medicine and Natural Medicine,

each of which, in part, traced the development of alternative

therapies and their battles with orthodoxy.

 

 

 

Inglis also had an interest in the paranormal and as a consequence, he

wrote one of the best books to look historically at the struggle

between science and 'irrational' ideas. In his book The Hidden Power

published in 1986, he writes with insight about the role of the

Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal

(CSICOP) in the ongoing battle between science and industrial

science. CSICOP was to become the fountain head of the international

skeptics movement which in turn helped to set up the european health

fraud organisations in the late 1980s.

 

 

 

 

The Contemporary Period

 

 

 

In the late 1980s and early 90s there was a sudden rush of books and

articles about the growing Health Fraud movement[2] in Britain and

North America. This was because a major push was begun in the mid-80s

by the pharmaceutical companies and it was these beginnings which have

led to the present drive for global regulation. As most of these

books made clear, especially Dirty Medicine, the forces coalesced from

three areas, all of which had a power base to defend: organised

professional allopathic medicine, the pharmaceutical industry and the

multinational food corporations.

 

 

 

The principal targets of this assembling army were inexpensive,

non-invasive, low technology, medical practices - herbal, homeopathic

and other 'alternative' treatments, vitamin and food supplements and

small companies which produced these as well as 'health' and organic

foods. From the mid-1980s the movements against these targets have

gathered velocity and impacted with increasing damage.

 

 

 

Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, writing for the Vegetarian Times in August 1991,

was one of the very first to write the critical truth about the

American National Council Against Health Fraud. In her intelligent,

even heroic article, The Health Fraud Cops - Are the Quackbusters

Consumer Advocates or Medical MacCarthyites? she told the full story

of the US health fraud group. Both she and Vegetarian Times paid the

price when the NCAHF immediately filed suit against them. Perhaps in

those early days it was too much to hope that people came running to

support Bloyd-Peshkin and Vegetarian Times but today, in the wake of

the quackbusters' frequent legal humiliations, as a matter of honour

everyone should get hold of a copy of this article and put it up

anywhere visible. Sharon, who now runs a parent/child health

organisation, would rather forget the article and the suit that

followed and modestly claims no accolades for her far sighted article.

 

 

 

One of most effective and well researched books which came out in the

early 1990s was written by researcher and activist P. J. Lisa and

called Are You a Target for Elimination? Like myself, Lisa had joined

up with a group which had come under attack - in his case a company

which produced herbs. His first book began to describe the attacks

which were taking place out of public view. In Are you a Target, Lisa

focused on the continuing attempts by quackbusters to destroy

chiropractors. This book was followed up in 1988 with a more complete

analysis in The Great Medical Monopoly Wars. Both these books by Lisa

and his more recent ones, bear all the hallmarks of good investigative

writing and critical scholarship in this difficult area. In them he

begins to define the Health Fraud movement in America, to give body to

its motivation and to root out and to expose its funding. It is

principally due to Lisa that we are able to say that pharmaceutical

companies bankrolled the health fraud movement in America.

 

 

 

In 1992, James P. Carter, a doctor from New Orleans, wrote another in

the series of exposes against the cabal which was now being identified

as behind the various attacks, Racketeering in Medicine. Being a

doctor, Carter was keen on exposing the suppression of non-invasive

medical techniques - particularly chelation therapy, a chemical and

vitamin treatment which helps to clear blocked arteries and is said by

some to be an alternative to heart bypass surgery. Carter's book was

also groundbreaking in a way because rather than report on the

individuals and organisations who were launching the attacks, he

talked about the therapies which were being suppressed. On

publication, Carter and Hampton Road the book's publishers, were

immediately sued by Stephen Barrett the most prominent 'quackbuster'

in North America. The case, however, was thrown out of court and

according to Tim Bolen, this case began the demise of Barrett and the

NCAHF.

 

 

 

In 1995 and 1996, over the period of a year, the medical license of

Guylaine Lanctot MD was challenged by the Quebec College of

Physicians. During the time that she was brought before the hearings,

she published The Medical Mafia which recorded all the varying

objections she had to allopathic medicine. The book is a novel

mixture of writing and diagramatic pictures. Lanctot seemes to have

been braver than most of us, willing to use a novel presentation with

her novel thoughts. Part of the book deals with the political role of

the World Health Organisation.

 

 

 

The 54 year old mother of four was accused by the Quebec College of

Physicians of, 'misleading the public in her capacity as a doctor by

communicating false, misleading, inciting information which

contravenes scientific medical thinking, without also informing the

general population of opinions which are generally accepted by the

medical community'. Five of the eight charges brought against her

referred to her opposition to childhood vaccination. By her

opposition to vaccination, she was supposed to have endangered the

health of the population, promoted fear of vaccination and advocated a

view not recognised by the medical profession.

 

 

 

Following a 'guilty' verdict at her long drawn out trial, Lanctot was

barred from practising medicine for the rest of her life and the

tribunal who found her guilty awarded costs to themselves, asking that

she paid the full cost of the hearings against her. 'Over my dead

body!', she apparently said to one newspaper. Another book was

written about Lanctot's trial, by Joachim Schafer, in The Trial of The

Medical Mafia. Schafer sifted through the thousands of pages of the

hearing to analyse the case brought against Lanctot.

 

 

 

 

 

The Cancer Strand

 

 

 

One main target for attack at the heart of the Health Fraud movement

has always been alternative cancer treatments. It is abundantly clear

why this should be so because cancer research is a booming

multi-million dollar industry and environmental illnesses such as

chemical sensitivity have to be denied to the last, in the face of

large claims from sufferers[3]. A small number of writers have pieced

together the ways in which the cancer establishment maintains its

censorship over alternative treatments and stymies preventative work.

 

 

 

Ralph Moss and Professor Samuel Epstein came at the problem of

censorship from two different perspectives. While Epstein has tried

valiantly to bring the manufacturers of environmental carcinogens to

book, Moss has drawn attention to alternative treatments which have

been censored. Ralph W. Moss, has spent more than twenty years

investigating and writing about cancer issues. Formerly the assistant

director of public affairs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center,

Moss was a founding advisor to the National Institutes of Health's

Office of Alternative Medicine, and is presently scientific advisor to

the Rosenthal Center of Columbia University and the University of

Texas School of Public Health. In 1997, Moss was chosen as scientific

advisor and honorary member of the German Oncology Society, the first

American so honoured in over 20 years.

 

 

 

In both cases, their first significant books, Moss's The Cancer

Industry and Epstein's The Politics of Cancer, produced shock waves

which tutored a whole generation. Sam Epstein has carried the torch

lit by individuals like Rachel Carsons and the well known sociologist

Edwin H. Sutherland, in writing unambiguously about the corruption of

science in corporations and the corrupt reach and influence of the

chemical and pharmaceutical companies[4]. Epstein has been

exceptional amongst his generation of public health academics in his

constant willingness to name names and write the reality of corporate

liability. He has been father to a whole contemporary younger

generation of investigative writers who have followed him in naming

both corporations and individuals.

 

 

 

The writer who best reflects the Health Freedom Movement's focus on

consumer choice in the area of cancer, is however, Barry Lyon. Lyon

who has written consistently about the suppression of cancer

treatments since the 1970s has ploughed a lonely but straight furrow.

His books which tell it like it is, are far from academic texts,

written with activists and sufferers in mind. Lyon became interested

in suppressed cancer cures after studying Royal Rife. His first book,

The Cancer Cure that Worked has become a best seller and looks at the

life and times of Rife. In 1990, aware of the lack of individual

choice in the area of cancer care, Lyon wrote Helping the Cancer

Victim: Patient Rights, Medical Freedom & the Need for New Laws. This

short book, is a handbook for those affected by cancer and those

seeing the need for campaigning for legal changes.

 

 

 

Christopher Bird, well known for his book about the secret life of

plants, also got involved in questioning the cancer establishment when

he was the first person to recover one of Rife's microscopes. In

1996, Bird wrote the superb Trials of Gaston Naessens. The book is

excellent, on the spot reportage, enhanced by his description of

arriving in town for the trial with his typewriter and returning to

his hotel room every evening after the hearing to bash out his notes

which formed the basis of the book. Naessens was an experienced

laboratory scientist and doctor who built a microscope similar to

Rife's. Over a long period of scientific investigation he discovered

the life cycle of a micro organism which was present in people who

contracted cancer. He developed a treatment which damaged the

organism and began to prescribe it, hence his prosecution by the

Canadian medical profession.

 

 

 

Two other therapeutic approaches which have come under constant attack

over the last decade, are those of Dr. Hulda Clark and Dr. Max Gerson.

Max Gerson was a German Doctor who fled to North America in the

1930s. Having worked on diabetes, mainly from a nutritional

perspective, he turned his nutritional ideas to cancer. Like Rife and

a number of other highly qualified practitioners who developed

treatments for cancer, Gerson consistently wrote up his cases as well

as presenting cases and trials of his work to sceptical allopathic

doctors. Unfortunately these attempts at bridge building got nowhere

simply because his treatments did not involve chemical drugs which

could be bought and patented by the pharmaceutical companies.

 

 

 

Gerson set up an Institute to perpetuate his work and the publication

of his writings. In 1958, he published A Cancer Therapy, Results of

Fifty cases. Since his death a number of people have written books

based on their own cures using his treatment, most particularly Beata

Bishop in A Time to Heal: Triumph over Cancer, the Therapy of the Future.

 

 

 

Gerson's work has re-emerged in the last thirty years in Britain.

Aspects of the treatment were at the heart of the philosophy adopted

by the Bristol Cancer Help Centre[5] which was mercilessly attacked by

the cancer research charities and aligned quackbusters in 1991[6].

Then in 2002, Michael Gearin-Tosh, a lecturer at Oxford University

wrote his exceptional book, Living Proof: A Medical Mutiny. This book

emerges in a very modest but self assured manner as one of the best

pieces of literature on a self cancer cure and it stressed with great

power the necessity and the problems of being free to make one's own

treatment choices. Gearin-Tosh waited almost seven years after curing

himself of cancer, to validate his cure before publishing his story.

His cure, which depended in large part on Gerson's therapy, stirred

considerable controversy in the British media, with members of the

British 'quackbusters' crawling out from the woodwork and throwing

epithets at Gearin-Tosh and those who have taken his side, including

Prince Charles. Gearin-Tosh died in July 2005.

 

 

 

In America, the NCAHF and other quackbusters, have until recently

been much more energetic, making continuous attempts to shut down the

clinics of Dr. Hulda Clark. Clark has suffered a series of

depredations, beginning with her arrest in 1999. This was followed by

attempts to shut down her clinics and actions brought against people

using her treatments or technology. Clark has written a number of

best selling books in which she outlines her case for cancer being

cured with detoxification and electromagnetic fields. Quackbusters'

lack of success and even humiliation in courts, has not stopped these

particular 'quackbusting' activities crossing the Channel, where

naturopath Roy MacKinnon stood trial in Wales earlier this year for

selling Clark's therapies to a cancer patient. At MacKinnon's trial

the judge who threw the case out, expressed surprise that anyone could

be brought to court having made a claim `to cure cancer', when the

prosecution did not have a shred of evidence to support the charge.

 

 

 

By the mid-1990s, attacks upon cancer therapists, were well reflected

in the writings of activists and advocates, people who did not see it

as their sole purpose to write. The attacks on Hulda Clark have been

defended by Tim Bolen, now America's foremost anti-quackbuster. Bolen

provides intelligence and legal advice for defendants and puts up to

the minute news about the increasingly failing court actions against

alternative therapists on his Quackwatch website.

 

 

 

 

 

Dissidents break the AIDS Monopoly

 

 

 

The critique of the whole phenomena of AIDS, by gay men and others,

could be said to represent the first wholesale grass roots addition to

the Health Freedom Movement. In that this movement came immediately

into collision with doctors, governments and the pharmaceutical

companies over the concept of freedom of treatment choices, it

represented quite an unusual aspect of Health Freedom because it was,

in the main, organised by those on the ground who were threatened by

illness. From the early setting up of treatment groups in America,

which bought in and dispensed unlicensed treatments, to the activists

in London who attacked the Wellcome Foundation and organised against

AZT, there developed a substantial critique of suppression,

containment and forced treatment.

 

 

 

Information about this aspect of the Health Freedom Movement can be

found on the website AIDS MYTH, which presents critical texts,

analysis and ongoing discussion for both scientists and lay people of

all the aspects of the AIDS phenomena. The London organisation

Continuum which produced a magazine of the same name ran for almost

ten years, consistently reporting on pharmaceutical company spin and

the suppression of science in this area. A number of books look at

the medical and scientific conflicts in this area, include those by

John Laurence, Neville Hodgkinson, Joan Shenton, Gary Null and Serge Lang.

 

 

 

 

 

Journalists and Activists as Good Writers

 

 

 

In the contemporary period, more and more is being written both about

the activities of the pharmaceutical companies and Quackbuster

activists, the suppression of alternative therapies and the terrible

cost of iatrogenesis. There has yet to be any kind of overall view of

the Health Freedom movement in a book. One of the principle reasons

for this is that there is now the involvement of a large number of

journalists and activists who write short texts and not books.

 

 

 

One of the best writers in the field, who manages to pull together

contemporary politics and the denial of freedom, is Eve Hillary an

American health activist and writer living in Australia. Hillary's

populist but still academically sound style, is reminiscent of the

great Janet Malcolm. Journalists who show a commitment to the Health

Freedom Movement are thin on the ground in Britain, partially because

of the British Journalists' forced commitment to 'balance' and 'fair

play'. This commitment ensures that the pharmaceutical companies and

doctors who pimp their drugs always have to be given equal, if not

greater space, than the victims of iatrogenesis or those denied

treatment choices. One journalist who has linked up with the Alliance

for Natural Health is Rose Shepherd - a long piece by her can be read

on their site. More recently she has had a cover story in the July

31, Sunday Times Magazine, entitled Death of the Magic Bullet. This

long article set to become a classic, looks exclusively at adverse

reactions to drugs. Shepherd is a committed anti-vivisectionist and

has also written a number of novels.

 

 

 

In France, Sylvie Simon brings a lifetime's experience to her

philosophical writing about the power and mystique of the Medical

profession. Sylvie Simon is a novelist and journalist. She has

written books on the paranormal and esotericism. For the last eight

years, she has been fighting disinformation in the fields of health

care and ecology. She has published many essays about the latest

scandals in France, including blood contamination, mad cow disease,

asbestos poisoning, growth hormones and vaccination.

 

 

 

Articulation within the area of health freedom is made slightly easier

for French writers because they at least have a tradition of

philosophical writing. Their major writers, like Foucault, Satre have

been activists as well. Michel Foucault wrote extensively about the

balance of historical power inside closed institutions like mental

asylums, prisons and hospitals. In The Birth of the Clinic he traces

the development of a place where people are treated which is separate

from the home and which becomes the breeding ground for all kinds of

professionals who assume power over the individual's health.

 

 

 

Another French person, who has recently loudly declaimed his

birthright following his treatment at the hands of the French State

and the Order of Doctors, is Loic Le Ribault. Loic is one of those

rare stars of the Health Freedom movement, a brilliant scientist and a

consistent activist who has served terms of imprisonment in France and

Switzerland, after manufacturing and selling organic silica as a

treatment for a number of conditions. Le Ribault's talents are

prodigious and over the last six years he has produced some three

books about his experiences as well as a novel. His most impressive

work is The Cost of a Discovery, a self published account of his

cases, campaigns and fight to the death with the French judiciary.

 

 

 

In Britain, a prolific writer who has made full use of the internet

and speaking tours, is Philip Day. Day also has a constant output of

books about medicine and the suppression of alternatives. His

crusading is similar to that of Vernon Coleman who has been self

publicising his battle against vivisection and medical misrule in

Britain for the last twenty years.

 

 

 

America has produced a large number of writers and journalists who

have been aligned with the major Health Freedom Organisations over the

years. One of the most prolific of these was Michael Culbert who died

in October 2004. Culbert was a founder-President of the International

Council for Health Freedom and was before he died, Chairman of the

Committee for Freedom of Choice in Medicine, Inc. and Editor of its

newsletter. As a long time health freedom activist, he was the former

award-winning California newspaper Editor of the Berkeley Daily

Gazette and was co-author of more than 20 books, in the areas of

Alternative Medicine, medical politics and economics.

 

 

 

Culbert had a plainly political approach to Health Freedom questions,

as is witnessed by the following quote: 'The solution to all this, of

course, is not scientific. It is political. If people have to take

to the streets to secure what should be their birthright - freedom of

choice in medicine, against the tyrannical concentration of economic

and vested interests, then they will.'

 

 

 

As was bound to happen perhaps the main locale of contemporary Health

Freedom activists is the internet and an ongoing selection of

reflections and exhortations on all the issues to do with Health

Freedom can now be found on a number of sites. One of the best of

these sites is that of John Hammell, a larger than life, truly radical

activist who has also put up on the net amongst his prolific work on

Codex, an engaging essay Why I am a Health Freedom Activist. In the

novelistic essay, Hammell talks about his 'cuckoo's nest' experiences

in a long stay mental hospital.

 

 

 

Sepp Hasslberger who with a daughter also runs a small publishing

company producing alternative health titles, has a site which is

always up to the minute in reporting different Health Freedom Issues.

His writing about complex issues on the site is, like the very best

journalism, lucid, clear and easy to read. Emma Holister, a brilliant

artist, and occasional writer, attached to the British based Alliance

for Natural Health has recently updated her Health Freedom site at

Candida International to include her paintings and references to other

Health Freedom writers.

 

 

 

The Rath Foundation site carries the campaign of Professor Rath, a

German scientist. In 1987, when he was 32, Rath discovered the

connection between vitamin C deficiency and a new risk factor for

heart disease. After publication of his research findings, Rath

accepted an invitation to join two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling

and in 1990 he went to the United States to become the first Director

of Cardiovascular Research at the Linus Pauling Institute in Palo

Alto, California. Today Dr. Rath heads a research and development

institute in nutritional and Cellular Medicine. He spends much of his

time fighting against EU regulations and Codex. Rath is perhaps one

of the dynamos of the Health Freedom Movement, combining information

with the massive organization of protests.

 

 

 

 

 

Philosophical approaches to Health Freedom

 

 

 

There is clearly a difference in the British, if not the 'European'

mind (if such an animal exists) and that of most North Americans.

While North Americans tend to see the usurption of healing by the

pharmaceutical companies and the professional physician entirely in

term of market forces, the European mind raises a more complex spectre

of the integrated professional power of doctors, their organizations

and the drift towards high technology science.

 

 

 

Conservative Libertarians, like Bealle, in both Britain and North

America have probably been able to see the philosophical picture more

clearly than left-leaning libertarians like myself. This is because

the individualist tradition has played a considerable part in

conservative thinking. While those who lean to the left, especially

in England, have had first to dismantle the idea of socialised

medicine. This later, of course is only half the battle because we

all have an obligation to formulate a detailed and contemporary

system which can take its place, something which few Health Freedom

Activists, European or American have done[7].

 

 

 

Many North Americans seem to shy away from criticising certain aspects

of capitalism, a sport which has (Soviet communism aside) a long and

reputable history in Europe. And while many Americans have recently

looked to Europe as the breeding ground for intolerance and

Nationalist authority, they often forget that no country in the world

has had more oppressive regulatory or professional medical bodies than

the AMA and the FDA. The very heart of the intolerant quackbuster

body is quintessentially American, having grown from the seed laid

down by the American Council Against Health Fraud and its friends in

CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of

the Paranormal.

 

 

 

While much American writing about Health Freedom speaks on behalf of

'real Americans' against controlling bureaucracies, some Americans are

adept at dodging the issue of what being a real American implies.

While many Europeans see the Rockefeller spectre with its rampant

accumulation of wealth as primarily American phenomena, Health Freedom

Americans seem to think of something closer to the pioneering spirit

of libertarian cooperation as the source of an American identity.

 

 

 

British commentators often make class an issue, suggesting that while

we are all British, some wield more power and have more deeply hidden

agendas. The North American psyche, even that which belongs to Health

Freedom activists, often seems unable to come to terms with the fact

that their society is divided along lines inscribed by corporate power.

 

 

 

This lack of introspection on behalf of many Americans has come to the

fore dramatically during the development of Codex. Seemingly unable

to blame fellow Americans as well as Europeans for the campaign

against vitamins, supplements and alternative therapies, some US

writers blame the 'European Nazi mind frame'. Historically, this

association between German scientists, pharmaceutical companies and

Codex is accurate and needs researching. However, any observer can

see that American hierarchies of power have been deeply involved in

the same agenda for decades. An agenda which is now and has been in

the past ambitious to rob the citizens of all the Americas, and more

recently of debilitated ex-communist countries like Poland, of their

individual health choices.

 

 

 

It is obviously tempting for all writers to look beyond the

straightfoward facts of the battles to regulate alternative

therapists, vitamin supplements and food. Once people enter the world

of the censorship and suppression of inexpensive and non invasive

treatments and cures, there is clearly a need for them to consider the

origins and motivations of individuals and organisations involved. We

live in a time of conspiracy theories, principally because there are

so many conspiracies but also because the opening of the contemporary

world of information, has led to greater record and speculation about

what is, and has, actually gone on in the world.

 

 

 

Expressing a completely personal opinion, I have to say that I have

the same approach to Health Freedom activists writing about

conspiracies as I have to footballers talking about their football -

great players are sometimes shown to be hopelessly stupid the minute

they open their mouths. The problem with many of the overarching

theories that circulate in the Health Freedom Movement, is that they

suffer from a poverty of real or thorough research. Consequently,

even such well documented issues as IG Farben, the part Rockefeller

owned German based chemical cartel, becomes the subject of esoteric

speculation.

 

 

 

In the midst of this confusion of ideas it is suggested that the Nazis

are behind the European Union, that the CIA is actually responsible

for it, that the English still run America, that the Americans run

Britain. The Health Freedom Movement is in fact populated by the most

diverse political thinkers and this is one of the great strengths of

the movement - as long as it focuses on Health Freedom and not on the

secret post war history of the world. After all there are enough

conspiracies within medicine itself still to be properly documented to

keep many a conspiracy theorist happy.

 

 

 

Personally, I feel that it would augur better for the movement in the

long run to stick to a well researched economic analysis in which

powerful corporations, government agencies, world trade blocs and

individuals, work to gain control of production exchange and

distribution of healthcare in its various forms. Such basic economic

argument gives adequate room for accounts of dirty tricks and the

involvement of groups like the Bilderberg and the Trilateral. This

work has to be done with exacting research not runaway or unevidenced

theories. To play out conspiracy theories beyond your immediate

national community and its economic plots, can be debilitating for

potential activists, who see a battle with the totality of the New

World Order as clearly beyond their capabilities.

 

 

 

The movement also needs to spend much more time on considering its

plan for the future, it has to develop an overall social philosophy

for health care. I for one, am not in the Health Freedom Movement

only to protect the economic designs of small supplement producing

companies. If we really do want a healthier world where health is

generated by the individual and then by community organisation, we

have to work through our ideas for this world. The Health Freedom

Movement must develop both a theoretical model and an active campaign

with realisable objectives based in the community.

 

 

 

 

 

Postscript: Writers and their writing

 

 

 

Morris Bealle House of Rockefeller (1959). The Drugs Story (1949

-1976). Medical Mussolini (1939)

 

Howard S. Berliner The Holistic Alternative to Scientific Medicine:

History and Analysis. International Journal of Health Services, 10(2)

1980. Scientific Medicine Since Flexner. In Salmon, J. Warren (ed)

Alternative medicine: Popular and policy perspectives. Tavistock

(1985). Philanthropiuc Foundations and Scientific Medicine.

Unpublished doctoral thesis, Baltimore: John Hopkins University (1977)

Christopher Bird The Persecution and trial of Gaston Naessans (1991)

 

Beata Bishop A Time to Heal: Triumph over Cancer

 

Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin The Health Fraud Cops: Are the quackbusters

consumer advocates or medical MacCarthyites? Vegetarian Times August 1991.

 

Tim Bolen http://www.quackpotwatch.org

 

Penny Brohn Gentle Giants: The powerful story of one woman's

unconventional struggle against breast cancer. (1986)

 

James P. Carter Racketeering in Medicine: The suppression of

alternatives (1992) Dr. Hulda Clark The Prevention of All Cancers

(2004) The Cure For All Cancers

 

Harris L. Coulter With Barbara Loe Fisher, Shot in the Dark :

Vaccination, Social Violence and Criminality. 19th Century Influences

in Allopathic Therapeutics. Homeopathic Science and Modern Medicine .

Divided Legacy: A History of the Schism in Medical Thought Volume I - IV

 

Michael Culbert Freedom from Cancer, The Amazing Story of Laetrile.

AIDS: Hope, Hoax & Hoopla (1989) Medical Armageddon

 

Samuel Epstein The Politics of Cancer (1978) The Politics of Cancer

Revisited (1998) Elaine Feuer Innocent Casualties: The FDA's War

against Humanity (1996)

 

Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish:: The birth of the prison

(1975) The birth of the clinic (1973)

 

Omar V. Garrison The Dictocrats' attack on Health Foods and Vitamins

(1970) Michael Gearin-Tosh Living Proof: A Medical Mutiny (2002)

 

Max Gerson A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases (1958 - )

 

Edward G. Griffin World Without Cancer: The story of vitamin B17 (1974)

 

John Hammell http://www.iahf.com

 

Josef Hasslberger Health Supreme. http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp

 

Henning and Robert Nilsson Sjostrom Thalidomide and the Power of the

Drug Companies (1972)

 

Eve Hillary Health Betrayal - Staying away from the Sickness Industry

(2003 ) Children of a Toxic Harvest (1997)

 

Neville Hodgkinson AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science (1996)

 

Emma Hollister http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/emma_holister

 

Ivan Ilich Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of

Health (1976) Estes Kefauver In a Few Hands: Monopoly power in America

(1966)

 

Guylaine Lanctot The Medical Mafia: How to get out of it alive and

take back our health and wealth (1995)

 

Serge Lang Challenges (1998)

 

P. J. Lisa Are You a Target for Elimination? An inside look at the

AMA conspiracy against chiropractic and the wholistic healing arts

(1984). The Great Medical Monopoly Wars (1986)

 

Barry Lyon The Cancer Cure that worked: Fifty years of suppression

(1987) Helping the Cancer Victim (1990) The Cancer Conspiracy:

Betrayal, collusion and the suppression of alternative cancer

treatments (2000)

 

Morton Mintz By Prescription Only (1967) Originally published as The

Therapeutic Nightmare (1965)

 

Ralph Moss The Cancer Industry (1980)

 

Gary Null AIDS: A Second Opinion (2002)

 

Mathias Rath http://WWW.DR-RATH-FOUNDATION.ORG Heart (2001)

 

Hans Reusch Slaughter of the Innocent (1978) Naked Empress (1982) 1000

Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection (1989)

 

Loic Le Ribault The Cost of a Discovery (2003) Le Prix d'une

decouverte: lettre a mon juge (1998)

 

Joachim Schafer The Trial of The Medical Mafia (1998)

 

Joan Shenton Positively False: Exposing the myths around HIV and AIDS

(1998)

 

Sylvie Simon La Dictature MÈdico-scientifique, The Medical and

Scientific Dictatorship (1997) Vaccination, l'Overdose. Vaccines,

Already at Overdose, (1999) Exercice Illegal de la guerison. Healing,

An Illegal Practice, Ed. Marco Pietteur (2002).

 

Edwin H. Sutherland White Collar Crime: The Uncut Version (1983)

 

Martin J Walker Dirty Medicine: Science, big business and the assault

on natural health care (1993). Loic le Ribault's Resistance: The

creation of a treatment for arthritis and the persecution of its

author France's foremost forensic scientist (1998). SKEWED:

Psychiatric hegemony and the manufacture of mental illness in multiple

chemical sensitivity, Gulf war syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis and

chronic fatigue syndrome (2003).

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Another book entitled The Therapeutic Nightmare: the battle over

the world's most controversial sleeping pill, was published in 1999 by

John Abraham and Julie Sheppard.

 

[2] I actually dont agree with the appellation Quackbusters because it

seems to reduce the whole phenomena to a cartoon representation.

 

[3] In Dirty Medicine I show how the ACAHF is related to both CSICOP

(The Committee for the Scientific Claims of the Para Normal) and the

American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). This later organisation

is very important because its defence of the chemical companies slots

neatly into ACAHF arguments, denying the cause of environmental illness.

 

[4] Slightly off the Health Freedom Movement beaten track but in the

same vein, is John Braithwaite's book, Corporate Crime in the

Pharmaceutical Industry. Routledge & Kegan Paul, England. 1984.

 

[5] The Centre was started by Penny Brohnn and others. Penny wrote two

books about making free choices in cancer therapies. Gentle Giants

and The Bristol Experience

 

[6] Although this attack almost destroyed the Bristol Cancer Help

Centre, it led to the first patients' campaigning group which

campaigned entirely against the bogus research which was published to

try and destroy Bristol. The women who organised their campaign wrote

up the experience in Fighting Spirit.

 

[7] In his book Medicine for the New Man, the Greek homeopathic

doctor, Dr. George Vithoulkas, suggests a token system which gives

every consumer the right to draw on therapies of their own choice up

to the value of their tokens.

 

 

forwarded by

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Alternative Views on Health

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