Food For Thought

I have a passion.  It’s biased yet with merit.  I am  unabashedly a proponent of the use alternative medicines & prevention.  And, I know I’m among friends here who feel the same…how refreshing! What people often don’t realize is that California has a strong AMA. ND’s, naturopathic doctors, are not allowed to practice here. It’s ridiculous.

One of my Chinese students said, “It’s not alternative, Miz F [the nickename that class gave me]. It’s been around my culture for over 2,000 years.”  She was referrring to, of course, Chinese medicine which includes: accupuncture, herbs, moxibustion, and Chinese massage.

I don’t use allopathic t[traditional] medicine unless I’m in the dental chair and my dentist numbs the gum.  Not to say I wouldn’t use it in emergency situations….I’m not a martyr, by any means.  It just means, on the whole,  I stay away from over-the-counter drugs and Big Pharma and use alternative medicine, if needed.  I believe the body will rally to homeostatis if given half a chance without medicine, herbal or otherwise.

My favorite book about it all is “Selling Sickness” by Moynihan and Cassels.  Extraordinary. It’s divided into chapters that take on a different medication put out by either Merck, Astra Zeneca, GlaxoSmithKline or Johnson and Johnson, to name a few.  So, you don’t have to read the whole book if you don’t want to.  The prologue is a glimpse of dirty tricks: 

• the pharma industry is $50 billion a year, $5,707/hr  
• the “experts,” often on pharma payroll, have lowered the blood pressure numbers and redefined disease thereby automatically increasing customers and having a cross-use for a drug, both resulting in increased profits
• increasing fear of heart attacks persuading women to use HRT, early death to promote CHO meds,  & youth suicide to sell parents powerful drugs for even mild depression
• bottom line: more healthy people are being defined as sick resulting in higher profits [and disasterous side effects & more drugs to counter the side effects]

Pharma reps say they are empowering the “consumer” and that their paid celebrities are educating the public about health conditions.  This type of “reasoning” isn’t difficult to refute.  If an improvement in human health were truly the industry’s primary aim, we would focus on more useful actions.  Perhaps some of the billions invested in expensive drugs to lower the ‘cholesterol of the worried’ might more efficiently spent on campaigns to reduce smoking, increase physical exercise and improve diet. Yet health education is not valued: departments are likely small and I’ve consulted with  some that were  in [hospital] basements.    Additionally, the departmental budget is usually minimal. 

Moynihan and Cassels write: “This disease-mongering is an assault on our collective soul by those seeking to profit from our fear.  It is no dark conspiracy, simply daylight robbery.”  It’s the black magic of disease mongering, the process of doctors and big pharma widening the boundaries of illness resulting in more patients and the selling of more drugs.  Once we learn the tricks of the trade, we’ll be capable of seeing the ‘formula’ every where!

 If one reads the Weston Price materials,  the truth is all there at  http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/fats_phony.html.  Chapter 1 reports that part of that bundle of profits, Lipitor is racking up sales of 10 billion, making Pfizer of the largest corporations in the world, due to fear of high cholesterol.  That’s $127,000/day, $1,141 bucks/hr.  *chuckle* Sometimes, I think I’m in the wrong business.  But, then I regain consciousness and wonder how these people sleep at night.

I just wanted to *talk* about this.  It took me weeks just to plow through the prologue and register the manipulations and believe them.  I have a 10 slide presentation if anyone is remotely interested: I’ll send it to you to use/peruse.  It’s taken me another six months to continue to finish the book.  It breaks my heart, actually, to see this type of manipulation of people at a stressful time in their lives…when they are sick.   The whole experience of “waking up” is like a bad movie: I wanted it to end, yet I knew even as I finished the text, the deceit would continue as in a sequel. 

It was time to write about it, share the information and attempt to solicit and create support for a movement that says “Not interested.”   On behalf of the children, I put myself out there in protest of all those drugs promoted on behalf of their *health* and all the other drugs they take to manage the resulting side effects.

As always….it’s a good *hanging out* here: one of comraderie, alignment and support for all things good, sane and healthy.  I’m glad to be here and I’m glad you’re here too.

About the Author...

It has taken me years to unlearn much of what I learned about psychology and health. Suffice it to say, I believe in home schooling, the work of Price, Fallon, Enig and Cowan and one's right to be happy in one's life. My husband and I live in Sunnyvale, CA with seven fabulous cats. They teach us to take a nap when the urge strikes, to eat heartily when hungry and to stretch into the new day. La Vida es Bueno!