Blind Science

Ed Howes
filed under "Health-and-Fitness"

Scientific proof - it is all we care about. We paid much time and money to learn this, therefore; it must be more valuable than anything we can learn with an investment of less time and money. It justifies the ever spiraling costs of our practice. This is like saying that a course of instruction in a university is far more valuable than the regular use of the public library. That free knowledge can only be worth what we've paid for it. Western scientific medicine has taken this arrogant stance for close to a century. Little or no respect is paid to all the medical history that preceded scientific inquiry. Their god is scientific method and they pretend all they do is proven safe and effective by someone. They have no use for anecdotal evidence that created the folk and traditional medicine, practiced around the world to this very day. If grandma passed her gallstones with a mega dose of olive oil, they don't care because grandma is uneducated and does not worship scientific method. If a treatment doesn't come from our fraternity, it is of no value to us. By this attitude, we know their worship of science is more important than the Hippocratic Oath they swear. They are free to do all kinds of harm; if it is scientific. They have a license to kill and they do not take it lightly. Or do they? They would rather see you die from their often admittedly ineffective treatments, than to see you live, due to treatment that is unscientific. If a million people use an unscientific remedy and two die, it makes the TV news so the rest of the million will know they are flirting with death. They will finally go see the doctor they have not trusted for years. If they go see that doctor, they may wait for hours to be told; "I don't know anything about that treatment. You are probably throwing your money away." Then he will send them a bill for his service and they know they just threw their money away and they are sure this is what scientific medicine is all about. Why do you think they call their customers patients? "If you come to us for help you will have to be patient." The motto of the American Medical Association must be: keep them busy and keep them ignorant. Encourage the members to continue education that we approve and leave them little time to do so. Get them to choose specialties in school that further narrow their medical focus. Work them to exhaustion with the promise of six figure incomes. Point out that this sacrificial lifestyle gives them nobility and authority. "Mr. Jones, I do this procedure thirty times a week, you can trust me." It means the same as when buying a used car. Many millions of Americans no longer care about scientific method and double blind studies. If the friend, co worker, neighbor or stranger in a waiting room, mentions she got relief from arthritis using an unproven method, the sufferer won't hesitate to try it. If a million people are using scientifically "proven" prescription drugs and a hundred of them die from unproven drug interactions, the cause of death is a stroke, a heart attack, or natural causes. That will not be TV news and many of us wonder how many die every year from scientific treatment. How many people die to support the 186 billion dollar pharmaceutical industry? Their motto appears to be; whatever ails you - take more drugs, especially ours. Ask your doctor for a prescription. Their advertising pays off with larger and larger annual sales and profits. What they may not see is they are selling more and more drugs to ever fewer people. Many elderly are dying from treatments or kicking their drug habits by using natural and much less expensive methods. The monopolistic drug industry has had little interest in natural, unpatentable substances because the profit margins were so low, they could not afford to bother with them. But now, due to an act of Congress in 1994, low profit supplements have reached an annual American sales level of 18.6 billion dollars (likely more at the time of this writing); while only ten per cent of monopoly drug sales, it probably represents close to a fifty per cent sales and profit loss to the monopolies. To combat this loss to food supplement sales, they are raising the safety issue. They want to force the supplement industry to prove safety and effectiveness before they go to market, even though millions have been using them with good results for decades. In addition, they are pointing out that some of the 900 supplement manufacturers are not selling the strengths and contents advertised on the packaging. But the free market fix to this problem is already in place. Internet Web Sites now exist that rate the quality and content of popular supplements. They will most certainly improve or disappear if they are less than perfect. In addition, reputable M.D.s who are more concerned with results than scientific method, are recommending reliable supplements from suppliers who are diligently building their reputations for content and quality. Sometimes they cost more than similar products from reputable discount suppliers and every customer can choose between certainty and price; more so than they can with prescription drugs. The drug companies will do all they can to raise the cost of dietary supplements through government regulation. The ever increasing dietary supplement customers are informed of this drug game by their suppliers. Unlike the drug customers, supplementers are better educated and often know much more about health than their family physicians, trained in disease. It will be no easy task to scare these people into the arms of government regulators. This has been proven more than once. Astute Congressmen such as Orrin Hatch and Tom Harkin are looking at the relative cost/benefit ratios of drugs and competitive dietary supplements. Noting that a drug benefit can cost more than one hundred times an equal or greater benefit from an equivalent dietary supplement, it is dawning on them that established scientific medicine is a cost prohibitive racket that refuses to compromise. It has been proven many times that inexpensive dietary supplements can boost the effectiveness and safety of pharmaceutical drugs. Your doctor won't tell you because he doesn’t know. The drug companies won't tell you because you'll use less of their product. The alternative healers will tell you and save you money if you insist on using drugs. Before much longer, Congress will see the solution to the health care crisis is to move away from scientific disease management, toward prevention, health and healing. It has been long known that the worst possible place for a sick person is the hospital. When hospitals close for whatever reason, the local mortality rates drop. This means exactly what it sounds like. Hospitals kill more people than the diseases they treat. But don't you worry. It's all very legal. Hospital hygiene is less regulated than restaurants. So if we must regulate something, perhaps we should start here. This is much more an issue of life and death than ephedra, so you might never hear it on TV. Western medicine is at the crossroads. Alternative medicine will soon prove statistically, if un scientifically, that scientific disease management; directly, indirectly, short term and long term, kills more people than it helps. The sickly Westerner will learn what is making him sick. He will learn that no one ever died of a drug deficiency. He will learn that stress, toxemia and malnutrition are the root cause of every disease known to mankind and will respond in his own interest, instead of running to the science pros. About the author: Freelance writer published on many websites and in newspapers. justanotherview.com edhowes@hotmail.com