Preface: The following was intended to be the actual first chapter of my book; however, my father refused to associate his name to the book if this controversial chapter remained!

CHAPTER 1: 

In 2018, the total healthcare costs for a typical American family of four averaged $28,166, which is up over $3,000 from 2016. This is according to a recent report in US Today[1] which bases the estimate on the average cost of health insurance paid by employers and employees, as well as deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses.  The same report points out that most employees give little thought to their employer’s share of the cost, and only see what appears on their paycheck.

Yet part of their total compensation includes providing these health benefits, which is no different to an employer than wages, payroll taxes, and other employments costs.  It gets lost on people that one of the reasons that workers have seen smaller raises is because a larger share of the total compensation goes toward higher costs of these benefits.

It is what was slipped into this article, though, that is the most telling: “The incentives that reward health systems and physicians for providing more care — even when it may not improve a patient’s health — still prevail”.

Incentives typically come in the form of freebies, such as staff lunches and branded gizmos, to all-expenses-paid vacations, and even disguised monetary rewards.  Quite the conflict of interest.

While most physicians are genuinely more concerned for the health of their patients than potential wealth, like my Father and the long line of practitioners from whence he came, there most certainly are some bad apples.  Take the case of former oncologist and owner of the largest cancer practice in Michigan, Dr. Farid Fata.  He was arrested in 2013 on charges of prescribing chemotherapy to patients who were either perfectly healthy or whose condition did not warrant chemotherapy, then submitting $34 million in fraudulent charges to Medicare and private health insurance companies over a period of at least six years.

Dr. Fata pumped poisonous chemotherapy drugs into patients for years after telling them they had cancer.  They didn’t.   For his crimes, which affected over 550 patients, Fata was sent to prison for 45 years.

Then there is the case of Dr. Jorge Zamora-Quezada, a rheumatologist from Texas, who The Department of Justice said had given patients chemotherapy and toxic treatments they didn’t need, all to fund his “lavish” and “opulent lifestyle.” C.J. Porter of the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General’s Dallas Region told reporters in May of 2018, “His patients trusted him and presumed his integrity; in return, he allegedly engaged in a scheme of false diagnoses and bogus courses of treatment and doled out prescriptions for unnecessary and harmful medications, all for his personal financial gain and with no regard for patient well-being.”[2]

These are just two incidents where patients and their insurance companies were not only defrauded, but their doctors actually inflicted damage with toxic drugs.  There are numerous cases, like these, that demonstrate how in America greed controls health in complete disregard of the principal, “First do no harm,” attributed to the Hippocratic Oath.

The Hippocratic Oath, by the way, is not mandatory. In fact, in a 1989 survey of 126 US medical schools, only three reported use of the original oath.  This is not to suggest that most doctors are not administered some type of professional oath; however, there is no standard oath for which all doctors are expected by society to follow.

Although “first, do no harm” is attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, it isn’t a part of the Hippocratic Oath at all. It is actually from another of his works called Of the Epidemics.  But we want to believe that the medical profession has this as their ultimate priority.  If taken literally, however, no surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation would occur as they all cause some form of pain, bruising, bleeding or toxicity in treating medical conditions.

While there is some form of an oath for physicians, none exists for executives, research scientists, lab technicians, lobbyists or investors of multinational corporate pharmaceutical companies (aka Big Pharma).  The first priority of any publicly traded company is its shareholders, by law.  Corporate profits guide decisions in boardrooms, and in the case of Big Pharma, new drugs can take years and 100,000+ pages of application paperwork to get approval, so it is not uncommon for a drug company to promote “off label” prescribing of previously approved drugs. 

Prescription drugs are often prescribed for uses other than what the FDA has approved. “Off-label” means the medication is being used in a manner not specified in the FDA’s approved packaging label, or insert. Every prescription drug marketed in the U.S. carries an individual, FDA-approved label. Physicians have the authority to prescribe drugs for any reason they believe will benefit the patient, regardless of whether the use is on- or off-label. Off-label prescription is neither illegal nor unethical when based on the “best available evidence”.

More insidious, however, is Big Pharma’s practice of Disease Mongering, a phrase coined by medical and science writer Lynn Payor in her 1992 book Disease-Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies, and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick.  Payor defined this deceitful practice as “trying to convince essentially well people that they are sick, or slightly sick people that they are very ill.” 

Reporter Michael Walsh was recently quoted in Forbes, “Pharmaceutical companies regularly pathologize everyday experiences, convince doctors that they are serious problems, tell a hypochondriacal public it needs help and offer the cure: a new drug.”[3]  The classic Problem, Reaction, Solution marketing technique. Early examples include the coined term “halitosis” to sell a prescription antiseptic Listerine for bad breath and Fosamax to treat the precursor to osteoporosis called osteopenia.

Lisa Schwartz co-director of the Center for Medicine and Media at Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice said “Low testosterone was among the biggest cases of disease mongering — a huge increase in prescribing a drug before the benefits and harms of treatment were established. And yet, manufacturers claimed ‘low T’ — not aging or other medical conditions — was the reason why older men might have less energy, worse sports performance or even feeling more tired after dinner than younger men.” [4]

In 1997 the Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to Big Pharma to begin Direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug ads on TV.  By 2005, the drug industry spent more than $3 billion annually on DTC in order to get you to “Ask your doctor if ________ is right for you!” to increase their profits while decreasing your wealth.   A study done by Canadian and U.S. researchers in 2016 found that patients using off-label drugs without strong scientific evidence of effectiveness were 54% more likely to experience adverse side effects, such as an allergic reaction or gastrointestinal or respiratory complications. Or worse.

This money, and power, game has been around a long time. In 1908 the American Medical Association (AMA), with financial support from wealthy oil baron John D. Rockefeller and steel industry tycoon Andrew Carnegie, set out to dominate medical education.  They commissioned a school teacher and educational theorist named Abraham Flexner to document the state of medical schools then in existence for what became known as the Flexner Report.  This report, titled “Medical Education in the United States and Canada,” was published in 1910 and transformed the nature and process of medical education in America.  The biomedical model, based on Rockefeller’s petrochemical-based drugs, became the only standard for medical training, resulting in the decimation of homeopathic medicine.

In his book, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America, Richard E. Brown states:

“The crisis in today’s health care system is deeply rooted in the interwoven history of modern medicine and corporate capitalism. The major groups and forces that shaped the medical system sowed the seeds of the crisis we now face. The medical profession and other medical interest groups each tried to make medicine serve their own narrow economic and social interests. Foundations and other corporate class institutions insisted that medicine serve the needs of ‘their’ corporate capitalist society.  The dialectic of their common efforts and their clashes, and the economic and political forces set in motion by their actions, shaped the system as it grew. Out of this history emerged a medical system that poorly serves society’s health needs.”[5]

In the 19^th century homeopathic physicians that provided plant-based natural remedies at low cost and allopathic physicians, who relied on bloodletting, surgery, radiation and synthetic chemicals coexisted, giving patients a choice in medical care.  However, when he discovered new ways to sell petroleum-based products, Rockefeller invested in the German chemical company, IG Farben, thereby establishing the petrochemical drug industry which profits from medical maladies. 

The Flexner Report convinced the legislature to regulate the practice of medicine, control the accreditation of hospitals, and to control physician licensing. Simultaneously, an underhanded media campaign was lodged against homeopathic and chiropractic practitioners claiming their centuries-old therapies “quackery” or “charlatanism”.

This is the birth of Rockefeller’s allopathic medicine, consisting of surgery, vaccines, and drugs, which became the primary health option for Americans under the complete control of the AMA. “You had to go through John D. Rockefeller to get a medical license or a hospital license,” said Eustace C. Mullins, author of Murder By Injection, in an interview on the Rockefeller drug empire.  Mullins continues, “The AMA holds a position that they will never allow a homeopathic physician to become a member of the AMA and never have.  It’s against AMA principals to ever cure people.  Doctors have been drummed out the AMA for curing people.”

Author Shane “The People’s Chemist” Ellison wrote in his article How the AMA Hooks You on Drugs, Harms Your Health and Hurts the Earth:

To this day, there is no opposition to the allopathic occult. The Journal of the American Medical Association admitted as much when it published a 2004 article by Andrew Beck, which stated that “all accredited US medical schools strive to apply Flexner’s ‘uniformly arduous and expensive’ brand of medical education…” And the monopoly is fully supported by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and even mandated by the US court system, as seen by the myriad charges against parents who opt out of vaccines, psychiatric meds, surgery or traditional chemotherapy for their children. “As long as science shows these to have public health value,” the AMA insisted that they, “endorse mandating certain medical treatments.” [6]

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry in 2016 was valued at 446 billion U.S. dollars, and controlled over 45 percent of the global pharmaceutical market.  In 2008 over 3.9 billion prescriptions were written, which averages 14 per American. 

When medical care and pharmaceuticals became too expensive for the average person to afford, a new insurance industry was formed to keep the cash flowing into the robber barons’ pockets.  Today, Rockefeller company men have a member on every important board of every major pharmaceutical and insurance company in America. 

Surprisingly, with the most expensive health care system in the world, the United States ranks 12^th among the top 13 high-income countries in the ill health of its citizens.[7]  People are not getting better; they are actually dying at a rate of nearly 250,000 per year from “approved” drugs, unnecessary surgeries, physician medical error, and hospital staff errors. 

But their medical bills got paid.

NUTRITION IN MEDICAL EDUCATION  

It is well established that the body can heal itself when provided necessary materials, such as good food, vitamins, minerals and clean water, to rebuild cells.  However, many US medical schools still fail to prepare future physicians for everyday nutrition challenges in clinical practice. It cannot be a realistic expectation for physicians to effectively address obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, hospital malnutrition, and many other conditions as long as they are not taught during medical school and residency training how to recognize and treat the nutritional root causes.[8]

Results of a 2013 survey sent to the 133 medical schools in the U.S. reveals that 71% fail to provide the recommended, yet paltry, 25 hours of nutrition education.  Another study published in 2017[9] Reported that medical students felt nutrition was poorly integrated into the curriculum. They witnessed little nutrition counseling during shadowing experiences, and the nutrition information that was imparted was often outdated or incorrect. Residents stated they felt ill-prepared to offer nutrition counseling and desired further education in this area.

Toxic Medicine

More alarming than the declining health of Americans is the overt toxicity of prescription drugs.  It has been estimated that two million people are victims of prescription drug induced illnesses, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.[10]

Even more disturbing is the staggering number of deaths from prescription drugs in the U.S. as of 2018. According tot the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), approximately 100,000 deaths per year are the result of prescription drugs, making this the fourth leading cause of death in the country.

Drug toxicity is linked to obesity, diabetes, cancer, kidney disease, autism, depression, and heart failure in patients. 

[1] Boulton, Guy. “You’ll Be Shocked at How Much Health Insurance Costs for a Family of Four.” USA Today. June 07, 2018. Accessed October 27, 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2018/06/06/health-care-costs-price-family-four/676046002/.

[2] Jen Christensen, C. (2018). Texas doctor faces $240 million health care fraud case. [online] CNN. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/15/health/texas-doctor-medical-fraud-bn/index.html .

[3] LaMattina, J. (2018, June 28). There Go Those Drug Companies Inventing New Diseases Again. http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2018/06/20/there-go-those-drug-companies-inventing-new-diseases-again/#42379dc734bb

[4] News, Yahoo. “Malady Mongers: How Drug Companies Sell Treatments By Inventing Diseases.” The Huffington Post. June 08, 2018. Accessed October 27, 2018. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/malady-mongers-how-drug-companies-sell-treatments-by-inventing-diseases_us_5b1ab5e4e4b0adfb8268c762.

[5] Denman, Catalina. Brown, E. Richard. Rockefeller medicine men : medicine and capitalism in America. Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1979. Estudios Sociológicos. 2, no. 5-665-469.

[6] “How the AMA Hooks You on Drugs, Harms Your Health and Hurts the Earth.” The People’s Chemist (blog). May 11, 2011. https://thepeopleschemist.com/how-the-ama-hooks-you-on-drugs-harms-your-health-and-hurts-the-earth/.

[7] Etehad, Melissa, and Kyle Kim. “The U.S. Spends More on Healthcare than Any Other Country – but Not with Better Health Outcomes.” Los Angeles Times. July 18, 2017. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20170715-htmlstory.html.

[8] Adams, Kelly M., W. S. Butsch, and Martin Kohlmeier. “The State of Nutrition Education at US Medical Schools.” Journal of Biomedical Education 2015 (2015), 1-7. doi:10.1155/2015/357627.

[9] Danek RL, Berlin KL, Waite GN, Geib RW. Perceptions of Nutrition Education in the Current Medical School Curriculum . Fam Med 2017;49(10):803-806. http://www.stfm.org/FamilyMedicine/Vol49Issue10/Danek803.

[10] “How the AMA Hooks You on Drugs, Harms Your Health and Hurts the Earth.” The People’s Chemist (blog). May 11, 2011. https://thepeopleschemist.com/how-the-ama-hooks-you-on-drugs-harms-your-health-and-hurts-the-earth/.