Shocking victory for proponents of alternative medicine
By Jon Rappoport
Breaking: In Australia, an effort to label all alternative
(traditional, complementary) medicine products as "based on
pseudoscience" has failed.
Traditional remedies (much older than mainstream medicines) are defended as appropriate, and can include health claims.
The Crazz Files, a major defender of health freedom in
Australia, reports: "In a major win, the Federal Government has ignored
the Australian Greens and anti-complementary medicine activists like
Doctor Ken Harvey...and passed a reform package that protects
traditional medicine."
"The Therapeutic Goods Amendment (2017 Measures No. 1) Bill,
which passed Parliament on February 15, supports positive claims for
complementary medicines based on traditional evidence, and abolishes the
current complaints system."
"Greens voters were shocked to learn Greens Leader and
General Practitioner, Senator Dr Richard Di Natale was aligned with
skeptics, whose platform is: 'There is no alternative to [modern]
Medicine'."
"One of his [Dr. Di Natale's] 'concerns' was that people were
being 'misled' by traditional claims about the effectiveness of
complementary medicine. He, and the skeptics, wanted labels on
complementary and traditional medicines to state: 'this traditional
indication is not in accordance with modern medical knowledge and there
is no scientific evidence that this product is effective'."
"The Minister for Rural Health, Senator Bridget McKenzie, told Di Natale: 'I think it is offensive and disrespectful to those who practice traditional medicine'."
"'For some, particularly those using Chinese medicine, the
history of practising in that traditional medicine paradigm goes back
thousands of years. It's been extensively refined, practised and
documented and in many cases incorporated into mainstream medicine.
So, a statement required by the Australian Government that the
indication is not in accordance with modern medical knowledge and that
there is no scientific evidence will be seen as arrogant and
insensitive to those practising and using traditional Chinese
medicines,' Senator McKenzie said."
Boom.
All right. Now I want to treat readers to a brief analysis of
"modern medicine," the so-called scientific system that is the "only
valid system." It is the system employed in Australia, America, and
virtually all countries in the world.
People who watch the news or read mainstream news have the
impression that "scientific" medical research is remarkably valid and
always progressing.
Doctors and medical bureaucrats line up to confirm and ceaselessly push this view.
But they are concealing a dark truth.
Let's go to the record. Here are two editors of two of the
most prestigious and respected medical journals in the world. During
their long careers, they have read and scrutinized more studies than any
doctor, researcher, bureaucrat, or so-called medical blogger. And this
is what they have written:
ONE: "It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the
clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of
trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no
pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over
my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
(Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, "Drug
Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)
TWO: "The case against science is straightforward: much of
the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted
by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory
analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession
for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has
taken a turn towards darkness...
"The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is
alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too
often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they
retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their
fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our
acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a
place in a select few journals. Our love of 'significance' pollutes the
literature with many a statistical fairy-tale...Journals are not the
only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and
talent..." (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The
Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, "Offline: What is medicine's 5 sigma?")
There are many ominous implications in these two statements. I will point out one.
Incompetent, error-filled, and fraudulent studies of medical
drugs---for example, published reports on clinical trials of those
drugs---would lead one to expect chaos in the field of medical
treatment. And by chaos, I mean: the drugs cause widespread death and
severe injury.
Again, if a person obtains his news from mainstream sources, he will say, "But I see no evidence of such a vast scandal."
That is a conspiracy of silence. Because this widespread
death and grievous harm HAS been reported. Where? In open-source medical
literature.
For example: On July 26, 2000, the US medical community
received a titanic shock, when one of its most respected public-health
experts, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revealed her findings on healthcare in
America. Starfield was associated with the Johns Hopkins School of
Public Health.
The Starfield study, "Is US health really the best in the
world?", published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
(JAMA), came to the following conclusion, among others:
Every year in the US, correctly prescribed, FDA approved
medical drugs kill 106,000 people. Thus, every decade, these drugs kill
more than a MILLION people.
On the heels of Starfield's astonishing findings, media
reporting was rather perfunctory, and it soon dwindled. No major
newspaper or television network mounted an ongoing "Medicalgate"
investigation. Neither the US Department of Justice nor federal health
agencies undertook prolonged remedial action.
All in all, those parties who could have taken effective steps to correct this ongoing tragedy preferred to ignore it.
On December 6-7, 2009, I interviewed Dr. Starfield by email. Here is an excerpt from that interview.
Q: What has been the level and tenor of the response to your findings, since 2000?
A: The American public appears to have been hoodwinked into
believing that more interventions lead to better health, and most people
that I meet are completely unaware that the US does not have the 'best
health in the world'.
Q: In the medical research community, have your
medically-caused mortality statistics been debated, or have these
figures been accepted, albeit with some degree of shame?
A: The findings have been accepted by those who study them.
There has been only one detractor, a former medical school dean, who has
received a lot of attention for claiming that the US health system is
the best there is and we need more of it. He has a vested interest in
medical schools and teaching hospitals (they are his constituency).
Q: Have health agencies of the federal government consulted
with you on ways to mitigate the [devastating] effects of the US medical
system?
A: NO.
Q: Are you aware of any systematic efforts, since your 2000
JAMA study was published, to remedy the main categories of medically
caused deaths in the US?
A: No systematic efforts; however, there have been a lot of
studies. Most of them indicate higher rates [of death] than I
calculated.
Q: Did your 2000 JAMA study sail through peer review, or was there some opposition to publishing it?
A: It was rejected by the first journal that I sent it to, on the grounds that 'it would not be interesting to readers'!
---end of interview excerpt---
Physicians are trained to pay exclusive homage to
peer-reviewed published drug studies. These doctors unfailingly ignore
the fact that, if medical drugs are killing a million Americans per
decade, the studies on which those drugs are based must be fraudulent.
In other words, the medical literature is suspect, unreliable, and
impenetrable.
WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT THE TWO ESTEEMED MEDICAL EDITORS I QUOTED ABOVE---MARCIA ANGELL AND RICHARD HORTON---ARE SAYING.
If you know a doctor who enjoys sitting up on his high horse
dispensing the final word on modern medicine, you might give him the
quotes from Dr. Angell and Dr. Horton, instruct him to read them, and
suggest he get in touch with Angell and Horton, in order to discover
what has happened to his profession.
As in: DISASTER.
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